Music, multiliteracies and multimodality: Exploring the book and movie versions of Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing

Well-known stories in established and contemporary literature for children are increasingly becoming available in various moving image media versions as well as in traditional book formats. Classroom exploration of the same story in different narrative formats has addressed the impact on meaning-making of similarities and differences in language and image across versions. What has received very little attention however, is the role of music in conjunction with image and language in the construction of the potentially different interpretive possibilities of the multiple versions of ostensibly the same story. This paper discusses the nature and role of music, images and language in the book and movie versions of Shaun Tan’s story of The Lost Thing, drawing attention to the role of music in highlighting key interpretive differences deriving from subtle variation in the use of image and language in the two story versions. Implications for students’ multimodal text creation and interpretation in the context of the new Australian Curriculum: English are briefly noted