Tale Type 510A

Tale Type 510A from Sheri Larrimer on Vimeo.

The title of my animation refers to the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale type associated with Cinderella.  Some of the dialogue is quoted from D.L. Ashliman's translation of the Cinderella variation collected by the brothers Grimm.  Much of my retelling of Cinderella is based on the German version.  This means that my audience may be unfamiliar with some aspects of the story due to the fact that most American audiences are more familiar with Charles Perrault's French variation and Cinderella stories based off that version.  In the battle sequence, I reference the French version by showing two possible summons Cinderella can use, the pigeons and the more familiar Fairy-Godmother.  However, the Fairy-Godmother is grayed out, and a negative sound plays to show the "player" is trying to select it but cannot.  Including the grayed out Fairy-Godmother option serves as a nod to both the multiple variations of folktales and the potential for variations in a single videogame narrative.

In my animation I make many references to videogames from the 1990s.  The character name screen is modeled off of the Final Fantasy games, and most of the third person scenes are referencing the Final Fantasy games, Dragon Warrior, and The Legend of Zelda.  Even the odd text break in the step-mother's dialogue is an intentional nod to 1990s videogames which were often translated from Japanese to English by people who were either not paying attention to text breaks or could do nothing about awkward text breaks due to technical limitations.  The lentil sorting scene is designed to directly reference the battle sequences in Dragon Warrior.  I am interested in how game mechanics can mapped to unusual meanings, and here I have mapped the heavily text based battle mechanics from Dragon Warrior onto a dull domestic task from the Cinderella story.

The design of my characters has a decidedly more contemporary influence.  The character style is inspired by the 8-bit work of the artist known as Superbrothers.  While I was contemplating the use of gradients in Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP to denote the supernatural, I decided to break the illusion of a true 8-bit game by depicting Cinderella's mother as ghost which fades smoothly into and out of existence (an impossibility with 1990s videogame technology).

The style of the simulated gameplay changes for the ball sequence.  At this point the "game" becomes a side-scroller with a timer which counts up to Midnight.  With this re-imagining, the prince becomes an obstacle for the imagined player.  The prince slows the player down thus potentially causing her to run out of time.  In this animation, the imagined player also makes the mistake of picking up the dropped shoe, which disrupts the typical Cinderella narrative.  One of the issues we frequently confront when dealing with narrative in videogames is the problem of what to do when the player does something that ruins the sequence of events in the story.  One option is to simply give the player a game over screen and make them try again, which is the point at which I end this animation.  Careful viewers may notice that the cursor in the game over screen lingers on quit before going back to save and quit.  I wanted that action to show that the imagined player is considering leaving the game and never coming back (which would make saving the game unimportant), but ultimately decides that she will return to the saved game.  Although the animation does not end well for Cinderella, the actions on the menu screen indicate that the player intends return and bring about the happily ever after we all expect.

For the music I used three songs off of the 8-bit album Risistor Anthems created by Eric Skiff.  The album has been released under the creative commons attribution license.  The three songs are Digital Native, Arpanauts, and Come and Find Me.  I generated the sound effects using as3sfxr, an online 8-bit and 16-bit sound generator.