The Advantages and Limitations of a Non-Standardized E-Book: TheDisney "Animated" App

This week's blogging question has really caused me to think about the things I love and the things that make me frustrated about the e-book platform, and what it might mean for the future of the book. Again, my example is going to be the Disney Animated app, because it is the e-book I've most recently used and because I think it opens up some interesting discussion points for both the sophistication of the e-book and the drawbacks of the e-book.

As I've mentioned before on this blog, I think that the e-book's capacity for intermediality makes it an ideal format for certain types of text. For this book, which is essentially a textbook about the past, present, and future of Disney animation, the interactive components of this app (including videos, 3D models, pictures, and platforms for experimenting with animation) make it an infinitely more useful resource than a print book alone could ever offer. Not only does the app incorporate images and videos to illustrate the techniques it is talking about, but it allows the reader to have complete control over using them: you can zoom in and out on any aspect of the gorgeous high resolution photos of background (fig. 1-3) and character designs (fig. 4-6) to really get a sense of how intricate they are; you can play a video clip frame by frame (fig. 7) to really understand how the animation works and can skip between frames as you wish; you can practice animating facial expressions with the "Mood Shifter" (fig. 8) that shows how facial animation works at a later stage in the game; you can even animate and share your own animation sequences with an interactive model using a simplified version of the animation software used by Disney (fig. 9).

Figure 1 The following three images from the app illustrate the level of detail Disney puts in to their scenery design and animation. The first is a panorama of the famous forest background from Disney's Sleeping Beauty. If you zoom in on the app, you can see how detailed the image is, as seen in images 2 and 3, which focus on the bush by the tree just to the right of centre on the first image.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4 These next three images are meant to represent the 3D model of Pocahontas that Disney animators used to ensure that the character they were animating was on model, no matter which angle they were drawing her from. On the app, you can actually rotate the model 360 degrees so that you get a sense of what the model would have looked like and how the model could have been used.

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Figure 7 In the app you can drag your cursor to any of the frames in this short video, so that you can slow it down and re-play it to "spend some time with this example" to understand "the techniques...being used here" as the caption in this image suggest. It also auto-plays the video the first time, so that you can see the whole thing in motion.

Figure 8 By moving the yellow cross symbol to different locations on the diagram, you can change different aspects of the horse from Tangled, Maximus' face to try to emulate different emotions.

Figure 9 By moving any of the many nodes that make up Vanellope's body, you can create your own animated sequences. Here Vanellope is waving. If you look at the top right corner, you can also see the "Share" button that allows you to share the animation you create through various social networks.

The app also includes an interesting example of how e-books can make the allusiveness of a text more readily apparent. When the app introduces "The 12 principles of animation" (which come from an earlier Disney text called The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation written by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson and first published in 1980), the app then reproduces the entire chapter in the app (fig. 10-11). Of course, because the app takes advantage of its digital medium it updates all of the examples from the earlier text from still images to short animated films, making the app even more useful (fig. 12-13).

Figure 10 The 12 principles of animation picture here. Caption: If you click on the animated Mickey on the lower right corner of this image (in the app) it will take you to the app's reproduction of "The 12 Principles of Animation" chapter from The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation.

Figure 11 One of the pages from The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. This page is about two of the 12 principles: Squash and Stretch.

Figure 12 Clicking on one of the inlaid images on the page in the app will give you a preview of the video that you can play with. In this case, the Mickey Mouse image shows how breathing is animated.

Figure 13 Like the other videos in the app, you can search this one frame by frame to really get a sense of how the animation works. All you have to do is double tap Mickey from the first page.

The app also allows the reader to pick different entry points by making each one of its "chapters" a starting point on the home page(fig. 14).

Figure 14 The homepage for the Disney Animated app. You can scroll through the chapters by swiping left and right (in the app), then click on one to open it. The homepage also gives automatic access to some of its interactive elements and to its embedded illustrations from this page.

Unfortunately, this is where I started encountering aspects of this e-book that paper books and other e-book formats that more closely resemble a standard paper book that make it less useful than a paper book. Because I have to enter the book through one of the chapters, I can't easily "flip" to the exact page I am looking for. Because I don't have the ability to search the app using the "it was about this far up on the page about this far into the book" type method it made it frustrating to try to easily return to passages I wanted to. Some other e-book formats (like those used on the Kindle and the Kobo), try to alleviate this disparateness between books and e-books by adding a search function. This app does not.

In fact, some of the other closer to paper text functions (like highlighting and note-taking) that some e-book formats try to incorporate in their e-books don't exist in this app - which for someone who was using this app as a source for a paper was incredibly frustrating. I had to keep notes on a separate sheet of paper, and make sure that I had copied the information for the citation correctly (which, as I talked about in my last blog post, also turned out to be difficult in itself). In my own opinion, these are features that ought to be standardized in the creation of e-books to mimic an aspect of the paper book that worked really well (even if it seems like a non-essential part of the paper book).

Other aspects of this e-book that made it more frustrating to read than a paper book include its unskippable intro screen (a feature which it seems to have inherited from the DVD that is generally unpopular on the DVD format) and the inability to turn off sound until after you've entered the app (if you choose to allow it to keep playing, the book will play instrumental snippets of Disney songs the entire time you're reading it). While I think that the sound is important when you're watching the videos, and that it adds a nice nostalgic touch when images from a film are accompanied by songs from the same film, it makes using the app in a public place (or the library) without headphones a daunting challenge (It even plays if your iPad is otherwise muted!).

Overall, I think that the good far outweighs the bad for this app, since most of my grievances with the difference between paper page representation and digital page representation are minor annoyances.