- Original picture story shows can be enjoyed by readers and listeners on two digital terminals.
- A variety of mechanisms to facilitate communication that only digital technology can offer.
- In the future, an android version, an English version and a function to create original picture books are also being considered.
The 'Kaminashibai' introduced here is an application that allows users to enjoy original digitised picture story shows. It allows the user to move the pictures freely, introduce new characters and enjoy various other things that are not possible with paper-based media. The service won the grand prize in the BabyTech® Award Japan 2021 Learning and Play category. The BabyTech.jp editorial team interviewed Yoshihiro Toda (hereafter, titles omitted), representative of unouplus, the company that developed Kamanashibai, to find out more about the service, how it was developed and what the future holds.
We spoke with...
Representative of unouplus Inc.
Yoshihiro Toda
Profile icons for unouplusinc.
Amazing expressions and storylines that only a digital production using two terminals could pull off!
Editor: Thank you very much for your time today. Can you quickly give us an overview of Kamanashibai and its features?
Toda: Kamanashibai is an app based on a so-called traditional 'picture-story show'. We had been making apps for children for some time, but we thought that most children's apps could only be played by one person. ...... So we wanted to create an app that would allow parents and children to communicate with each other. Around that time, I often went to the library with my children and we were able to borrow a lot of picture story shows there. That's when the idea came to me: 'Couldn't we make an app for these picture story shows? ......'. A picture story show always requires at least two people and cannot be played by one person. Also, unlike picture books, I thought it would be interesting to have a format where the reader and listener read different pieces of paper. The result of this idea was Minashibai, which cannot be completed on a single smartphone and requires two or more tablets or smartphones.
Editor: It is such a feature of picture storytelling that Kamanashibai always requires two smartphones or tablets.
Toda: That 's right: by linking the two devices via Bluetooth communication, when the reader moves something on the screen, it moves on the listener's device in the same way. For example, in the case of Momotaro, a peach flowing from the river can be moved left and right.
However, if that was all, it wouldn't be that different from a normal picture story show, so we packed in a lot of things that are possible because it's an app. In the 'Big Turnip' piece, the only characters that appear in a normal picture-story show are the ones that are predetermined. With Kaminashibai, you can choose from a variety of characters such as grandfathers, grandmothers and dogs, as well as mites and sumo wrestlers. In Momotaro, the reader becomes Oni and the listeners become Momotaro and his friends, and at the end, a game-like battle begins.
