What is Animalia?

We decided to look at Animalia as an example of a story which has been reshaped by digital media and one of the more successful attempts transmedia storytelling for children:

'Animalia, 'was first published as a children's book in 1986 - it appeared as an alphabet book with an illustration for each of the 26 letters. While there was a strong 'animal-theme,' in the work, and the illustrations tended to lend themselves to further imaginings, there was no solid storyline.

The story was recently developed into a television series for channel ten, and as the original creator of Animalia, Graeme Base said, "given the complexity of the original artwork and absence of any obvious storyline in the original book, turning ANIMALIA into a television series was a huge challenge."

(cited in

In order to extend the world of Animalia from the book to the television screen, a central narrative was developed featuring the adventures of two modern day explorers Alex and Zoe, who mysteriously become trapped inside Animalia, a world inhabited by talking animals.

The series is made using high quality CGI animation signifying the growing digital media production industry in Australia, which has seen large-scale digitally animated features like, 'Happy Feet,' being produced in the country. So when it came to extending the world of Animalia to its online platform the aesthetic of the fictional world translated easily which gave it an advantage against some of the other stories we looked at. Animalia online has its own narrative. It takes the idea of ‘the core’ which is central to the narrative of the television show, and the user needs to make their way through the world to look for the hidden ‘corespores’, along the way learning more about the characters and about the Animalia world.

LINKS

 * (visit the Animalia Webpage [])
 * (back Case Study 2: Animalia)