Choice and Interactivity in the Flash Animation piece, RedRidinghood By Donna Leishman

When I viewed RedRidingHood by Donna Leishman another retold fairy tale came to mind, or rather a collection of them. That collection was Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber which retells fairy tales like Bluebeard and Little Red Riding Hood from a more progressive, feminist and contemporary culture perspective. Carter changes plot lines and characterization in order to comply with these agendas. She also plays with setting in a way that makes the time period associated with her fairy tales ambiguous and leaves the reader without historical context.

In Donna Leishman’s Flash narrative, RedRidingHood I see some of the elements Carter uses on the page also being utilized by Leishman, such as time/age confusion in the dream segments and most obviously, characterization and plotline changes. Of course some major differences in these two approaches is that Leishman’s medium contains music, is interactive which allows for multiple versions of the story, and it is the audience who decides which story line to pursue by clicking on textual and pictorial objects. But the main and most obvious difference is that Leishman is able to use very limited amounts of text and no speech to tell her story. Neither the page or traditional animation would be able to accomplish this video-game like 'choose your own adventure' storytelling in quite the same way. Furthermore, besides the interactive flash medium being, for lack of a better word, fun, it also adds a crucial complementary layer to the story that is being told.

I realize that there are quite a few original versions of the story but the one I will be referring to is the one in which the wolf swallows the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood whole and is then saved after a hunter comes by and splits the wolf’s stomach open freeing the two women. The hunter then kills the wolf by filling him with stones. As far as Leishman’s tale goes in comparison to the traditional Little Red Riding Hood story, the former humorously changes the wolf into a teenaged bad boy with wolf-like arms - a much more realistic threat to a modern day little girl than a wolf. One of the most fascinating plot changes comes at the end of the waking sequence (which is also always the ending for the whole story) in which Red is shown with a large belly ‘sleeping’ on the bed where the audience has just seen the wolf badly disguised as her grandmother. The utilization of Flash at this point allows the audience to roll their mouse over Red’s stomach to see that the wolf is inside her and in the fetal position. This medium again, allows for the ambiguity of what happened between the wolf and Red to be told without having to use any words. Because the picture of the wolf inside Red’s stomach looks like a fetus, one can easily infer that Red has either had sex with the wolf-boy and is now pregnant, or that she has simply eaten the wolf and he is now in her body. A final possibility is that she had sex with him and then ate him, but Leishman deprives her audience of such closure and I find myself not wanting it to end and wanting more (but in a good way). The whole situation is complicated by the “hunter” coming in and holding a gun to her head while she slowly opens one eye in an evil expression. I concluded that she was simply going to do to the hunter what she had already done to the wolf, whatever you choose to decide that was.


On the main page of RedRidingHood on eliterature.com the following is said about the work:
“The author quotes Roberto Simanowski's description, "'Little Red Riding Hood' from a feminist perspective? ... Leishman's rendition of Red Riding Hood is inundated with hybridizations of the traditional fairy-tale narrative: the wolf pre-existing as a picture in her diary, as a dealer at the 'flesh market,' an angel which does not stop to rescue her."

Leishman uses the interactive elements of flash in order to play with the ideas surrounding the importance of choices, free will and the consequences of the decisions one makes in life. This is an atypical approach to what is really a typical theme in the coming of age narrative: a young person makes a choice between A, B and C which can lead them to choices D, E, F, G, H, I and so on until an eventual outcome is reached. What sets Leishman's narrative apart from this is that the audience, misguided or not, feels some control over the character. At first I felt God-like as the person who can choose what happens to Red in her life, but then as I continued to play the piece over and over again making as many different choices as I could, I realized that in both Red’s waking and dreaming lives, the outcome never changes. At least in her dreams there are a variety of decisions that can be made to change what happens next, but the eventual outcome (the blank green screen with the endless sound of an alarm clock) is still the same in every dreaming section regardless of what road Red took to get there.

One argument that the story seems to be making and I do believe in fact that it is making several, is that choices in life, even in the total freedom that our dreams provide, are not only not as important in determining an outcome as we might like to think but also that we are so often faced with what look like decisions when the choice has really already been made for us by forces outside of our control. Like the end of the waking sequence, the beginning of the animation does not change and it is not until the audience has to choose between letting Red sleep and waking her up that any real decisions are made. If you choose to keep her awake however, that is really the only decision you as the audience will make in the whole experience. The piece leads the audience to believe that you have been apart of Red’s decisions up to this point since you had to click on some windows in order to get to your current point in the piece, but the reality is, those are the only choices the audience has in order to move on to the next frame. When the two choice are between a single set action or staying in one place forever, the choice begins to look less and less like a choice at all.

Click here for an Interview with Donna Leishman

Shelley Jackson- My Body

Hypertext is not new to digital literature. Then again, Shelley Jackson's My Body appears to have been written around 1997, and it's probably safe to assume that the hypertext digital literary technique was a newer phenomenon twelve years ago. Regardless, the manner in which Jackson has been able to integrate the novel's content (ie. her character's body) with the hypertext, complicates any attempt at a single linear reading of the work. Despite the fact that the technology is not incredibly advanced, the content of the literature itself is (which is admittedly a refreshing reversal from much of the digital literature I have encountered). The words and phrases that Jackson decides to turn into hypertext and the section of the work those words and phrases are linked to, seem highly crafted and compellingly enigmatic. For instance, in the vagina section, "what it felt like to have a penis" is linked to 'shoulders' and “Kleenex” is linked to 'nose' while “scented Kleenex” is linked to 'armpits'. The hypertext is a means to force the reader to make connections between the content of the hypertext to the section it is linked to. When I saw that the phrase "what it felt like to have a penis" was linked to “shoulders” I thought it made sense because I related "penis" and "shoulders" together as two body parts that bring to mind strength and msculinity. Shoulders however, are not necessarily always associated with one sex or the other, but when penis appeared in the hypertext linking it to the shoulders section I did not picture women’s shoulders, but broad, strong masculine ones. When I arrive at the shoulder section from a different hyperlink origin such as the body map page or from “monsters” which appears in the 'arms' section, my expectation of the writing in that section changes. Furthermore, the manner in which the language of the hypertext is related to the story that it is being linked to begs the question of which was written first, the hypertext phrase or the related story? The project certainly feels crafted enough to assume that the author had the premeditated intentions to carefully link these stories together, as opposed a technique like free association; yet, what I find adds even more to the complexity of the work is that it feels as though either techniques (or both simulataneaously) are at play here.

The use of hypertext in this piece also acts as a means to heighten and parallel the sense of being lost in one’s own body. The female character, a kind of tom boy, is constantly bewildered and disoriented by her own body. At first the confusion feels like something she experienced in her past, like her understandable juvenile confusion over how babies can come from between her legs. But in sections like ‘arms’ the speaker shares the adult experience of not being able to explain the shape of her body to other women. During my reading of the project, this is the first moment in which she hints that her childhood bewilderment is not something she has actually grown out of. The tone of many of the other sections, especially “vagina” also hints that the body is still mysterious, intriguing and mystifying to the speaker, even in adulthood.

Finally, the links allow the reader to feel the speaker’s sense of confusion in her digital/literary body by clicking on links that have the ability to endlessly take you to additional sections or get you stuck in a loop of the same few. From what I can see, the ‘phantom limb’ section is the only section that you cannot reach from the main body map page and the reader quickly discovers that “roller-skate” is the key to getting to the phantom limb. The story of the phantom limb then becomes a true phantom limb of the body that is Jackson’s literary work. As simple as the technology seems to us now, the hypertext technique here achieves what the page could not achieve as effectively. It provides a perfect medium for Jackson’s playful depiction of the physical body paralleling and existing simultaneously with the written body.