Olly's
Journey
starts out as a suburban obsession about an imaginary bear quickly grows into an international adventure, and the first of Olly's many ‘accidental’ missions to help animals around the world.
In this opening episode Olly unwittingly discovers his calling and we get to know him as an underdog, a boundary pusher, and an unlikely hero. But he does it all with a stumbling naivety and innocence that only adds to his charm.
Meet him for yourself in the pages of our draft.
Olly’s world exists in a universe inspired by the likes of Roald Dahl, Indiana Jones, The Adventures of Tin Tin and Where the Wild things are, and it shares the rhyming cadence of Aliens Love Underpants and Giraffes Can’t Dance. The language treats 5-8 year olds with intelligence and respect, inviting them to a challenging adventure while assisting them with the familiarity of rhyme and evocative images to aid their comprehension.
What
Author
Joshua Winger
grew up on a remote island off the East Coast of New Zealand, where his Grandfather set up a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre and christian commune in the 60s. He spent his formative years dreaming and creating stories in the back of a kombi while his missionary-parents smuggled bibles into the Eastern Bloc in the 80s. Returning home to the island he wrote;The Dentist, a short story assignment that was later published in the Correspondence School Curriculum.
His passion for story telling developed into a love affair with songwriting in his teens and eventually found a home in filmmaking in his 30s. In 2019 he won a scholarship to move to Sydney to do a Masters in Film Directing but returned home to New Zealand during the pandemic, where he rekindled his affair with the simple, imaginative stories he used to create in the camper van as a kid.
Joshua
Illustrator
Caren Pistorius
grew up in a small town in Africa where her curiosity and love for all things living was born. She divided her time between drawing, playing make believe and conversing with the animal kingdom (earthworms, elephants and everything in between). She struggled to read as a child but had no trouble understanding pictures and her talent for drawing was directly inspired by the careful study of her older brothers Asterix comics. She won her first art competition at 7 with a large crayon portrait of an an owl.
Her family moved to New Zealand when she was 12 and she graduated from university with a major in illustration and animation. While she has enjoyed a career in performing arts for the last decade her art practice has always remained a peaceful respite and the travel and life experience she has gained have continued to nourish it.
Caren
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