Grimm’s Rumpelstiltskin

Grimm’s Rumpelstiltskin 3D Interactive Pop-up Book is a storybook app for both iPad and iPhone. It’s available for €1.99 from iTunes from Ideal Binary Ltd.

This app is more than just a storybook – it’s a pop-up book gone digital. It is beautifully animated, and accompanied by really nice background music. Every second page is a story page or a pop-up page. On the story pages, you can choose whether to read the story to your child, or to have the voiceover read it aloud. Personally, I prefer to leave the voiceover switched off, and read to Little Man. But I’m sure in a couple of years, he may enjoy sitting down and allowing the voiceover to read to him.

From Little Man’s point of view, the real joy in this app comes from the pop-up pages. Each pages has interactive features – when you press each character, a thought bubble appears showing you what they are thinking; when the mill appears, you can spin the waterwheel in the stream; or when the miller’s daughter is in the spinning room with Rumpelstiltskin, you can poke him to encourage him to spin the straw into gold!

As I mentioned, this app is available on both iPad and iPhone. It’s okay on the iPhone, but I think it requires the iPad to really come to life. Maybe that’s because it just feels more natural to sit down for storytime with a book sized screen rather than with the small phone screen.