ABSTRACT
From the viewpoint of both creator of The King’s Ears story app and researcher, this chapter looks at the range of expressions of fairy tales in four kinds of children’s picture book (story) apps seen on the App Store: vehicles for advertising; spinoffs of animated features, as in the case of Disney’s Frozen; well-designed, child-centered fairy-tale entertainments by children’s book and app publishers, as exemplified by Nosy Crow; and the creatively realized literary artwork of Amanuta’s LittleRed App (2014). The chapter compares embedded video to sprite animation in terms of a child’s hermeneutic reading/playing experience and how the degree of player embodiment in the app design may influence the version of the fairy tale chosen by the publisher. Nosy Crow, whose apps are intensely interactive, felt that the child would have to act as murderer and victim if a character is killed in one of their apps. In LittleRed App, however, the interactions are all to do with rearranging the words, and potentially traumatizing events are not embodied.
