When this small but perfectly formed film won the Oscar for best short animation, its Australian creator, Shaun Tan, noted that ''our film is about a creature that nobody pays any attention to, so this is wonderfully ironic''. Co-directed by Tan and Andrew Ruhemann, it is based on Tan's illustrated book about a lonely boy living in a dystopian near-future who befriends a strange thing that looks like a cross between an enormous pot-bellied stove and a sea creature. He takes it home but his parents want nothing to do with it. The inhabitants of the city - an industrial wasteland of imposing walls and uniform housing, bleached of colour and life - don't notice the thing, lost in the drudgery of their existence. The boy takes the thing to the Federal Department of Odds & Ends (motto: ''sweepus underum carpetae''), a massive windowless edifice where he is given a pile of papers to fill out. But another creature warns him not to leave the thing there: ''This is a place for forgetting, for leaving behind.'' He gives the boy directions to a world of colour and life into which the thing happily escapes. The optimism of that scene, however, is tempered by the final one, in which the boy has grown up and admits he notices things that don't fit in less and less. The Lost Thing is an intriguing work whose message is not entirely obvious. It hints obliquely at a joyless Orwellian future of conformity and omnipresent bureaucracy (''Truth over-rated, explains Minister,'' reads a newspaper headline). This is softened, however, by the innocence of its protagonist and Tim Minchin's gentle narration so, ultimately, the tone is more melancholy than menacing.