Mr Trundle and the Tuna

Mr Trundle and the Tuna is an interactive, multi-modal book for junior readers aged 8 – 10 years old. Like the award-winning Josie and the Whales, this book is motivated by my interest in creating reading material for contemporary reading practices. Mr Trundle and the Tuna is deliberately designed for iPad reading, and similarly employs image (hand-drawn and photographic), sound, and touch to facilitate junior readers’ appreciation of environmental issues.

 

The story is inspired by deep ecology and indigenous views regarding the value of fresh waterway species and environments. In Mr Trundle and the Tuna Josie’s pet pig, and hero of the tale, is awakened to the plight of a group of native New Zealand eels (tuna) living in an industrially polluted and blocked stream. Guided by an endangered dragon fly, Mr Trundle comes to the aid of the stranded eels and helps them escape from the polluted stream to join a pod of whales migrating to Tonga in the South Pacific.

 

The story is visually conveyed through hand-drawn sequential art and photographic texture. Each illustration is augmented with a non-verbal, ambient soundscape composed of digitally manipulated site-recordings and open-sourced sounds that are activated by a touch button device. The device, positioned in the bottom right-hand corner of the page, is designed to enable the reader to take meaningful action and through that action become an operator in the screened book’s multi-modal storytelling.


Keywords: Fantasy, Pig, Dragonfly, Eel, Fresh Water Ecology, Polluted Environment, New Zealand.