Section VI: "RedRidingHood" by Donna Leishman
This literary game configures a very interesting postmodernist take on the children's literature masterpiece Little Red Riding Hood. To begin with, the author Donna Leishman decided to give the "reader/player" the possibility of experiencing a good number of different narratives by making RedRidingHood more interactive and more appealing to the eye. For a start, there's not much textual level intervention on the part of the author but the subtext is evident: meaning is constructed symbolically through basic but well-designed Flash animations. In a similar vein, the background music ascribes to a darker kind of genre. I contend that the intentionality of the author may have been that of giving the story a more dramatic nuance by resorting to more dramatic music.
According to literary critics, Little Red Riding Hood is a story that metaphorizes how young girls lose their virginity. In this e-literature piece, the figures of the little girl and the big bad woolf are obvious representations of this interpretation the literary critics put forward. But, in tandem, this is when RedRidingHood allows for a new take on the original story. The girl in this animated story lives in a apartment building, goes through a park (you can choose more than one possible adventure) and eventually has to deal with the woolf along the way. And towards the end of the story, she goes to bed, falls asleep and when she wakes up she realizes she is pregnant. The story may be less subtle than expected and it certainly paves the way for a reinterpretation of the original text.
