Storybook Opening

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A common device for starting a story, especially fairy tales, is to begin with a book opening. The Opening Narration goes on as normal, but as it goes on the book opens and we fade to see the story itself being played out. Just as if it came from the book itself. Usually the story will finish with the book being closed.

The Trope Maker here is the Disney Animated Canon, which has used it since the very beginning with Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs.

A subtrope of Framing Device. A sister trope of the one where the book is shown as it is being written.

Examples of Storybook Opening include:

Anime and Manga

  • Kämpfer: The very silly episode 12 did this.

Film -- Animated

  • Disney's Robin Hood does it as well.
  • Shrek
    • Subverted by Shrek, which opens with the title character reading a Fairy Tale... and then ripping out a page as toilet paper. Of course, it's still the same basic type of story anyway.
    • Played surprisingly straight in Shrek 2.
    • Used again in Shrek Forever After, with multiple pages being ripped off in frustration by the villain, Rumpelstiltskin.
  • Chicken Little opens with Buck Cluck deciding how best to begin the story. When the storybook appears, he rejects it as too cliched and moves on. Ironically, the storybook opening was originally going to be used for the movie, but was cut for apparently the same reason.
  • Beauty and the Beast uses a variation, with stained-glass illustrations on the Beast's castle windows instead of a book.
  • Hoodwinked uses it not only to begin the film, but also for each of the versions of the story as told by the various characters.
  • The Adventures of Mark Twain begins with a variant where the contents of an opened storybook spill out and form the world.
  • Justice League: The New Frontier starts like this. It's a very dark version, as the storybook is about the monster that's coming to destroy humanity, and the writer finishes by committing suicide.
  • At the very beginning of Rock-a-Doodle, just right after we see Chanticleer quitting his job at the farm of waking the Sun up with his crowing and moving to the city after the other farm animals make fun of him after seeing the Sun rise without him one day, the camera pulls back to show that the entire prologue (which is animated) is just a storybook a mother is telling to her young son Edmund (both played by live actors) when the evil owl is introduced for the very first time.
  • Another Don Bluth film, The Pebble and the Penguin, actually did this with a songbook.
  • Tangled was originally supposed to begin in a storybook style, as shown in the Extras on the DVD and also in the "Art Of" book, but was changed to the voiceover they used in the film.

Film -- Live Action

  • Used in Enchanted, for both the opening and the closing. Fittingly, the song that ends the movie opens with a line about "storybook endings".
  • Oddly used in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It doesn't happen at the beginning or end, but about twenty minutes into the film, with the description of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table.
  • The extended edition of The Lord of the Rings DVD menu.
  • Disney's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea opens in this style.
  • Used in the 1937 Shirley Temple version of Heidi for the opening credits and first paragraph.
  • Used in the Laurel and Hardy version of Babes in Toyland, but cut from many prints.
  • Elf not only has a storybook in its prologue, opening credits, and closing scene, but the menus on the DVD resemble pop-up books.

Literature

  • Used in a flashback in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Live-Action TV

  • Monk uses this for the summation in the last episode of season 3, "Mr. Monk and the Kid"
  • Hustle does it with the season 4 episode "A Designer's Paradise", although the book doesn't appear until partway into the episode when Albert starts explaining the con in terms of the fairytale "The Emperor's New Clothes".

Video Games

  • The old Crystal Dynamics game The Horde does this.
  • Radical Dreamers: This Super Famicom Satellaview game uses it as well. One of the few examples where the story is related through (it is implied) the text of the book itself. Chrono Cross does the same thing, only since it isn't a text-based game, the example isn't quite as unusual.
  • Myst has a variant; Atrus narrates as the Myst book tumbles through a starry void, before landing in front of you on a...surface. Open the book, touch the picture, and the game begins. Since you're supposed to be in a library as the Framing Device, one can assume that it was actually falling off a shelf, and the player picks it up to begin.
    • The book is actually falling through a starry void, having been dropped into it as explained in the sequel Riven. If you've played your way through the entire Myst series including Uru, you'll know that the book fell through the Star Fissure, and that the "surface" mentioned above would be the ground in the New Mexico desert. A funny Fridge Logic twist is that, if you've also read the books, you'll know that you could have picked up the Myst book, entered the Crevice nearby, and navigated your way through the caves to D'ni just like Ti'ana did in Myst: The book of Atrus. Then you could hand the book directly to Atrus where he sat, avoiding the entire first game and "winning" without ever having linked anywhere nor visited Myst island.
  • Paper Mario: Each game begins with a book opening and the narrator informing the player what "Today's story" is going to be.
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2 has one of these. At the end, it is revealed that Rosalina had been narrating it as well as the whole game.
    • It also transitions into the "Green Star Challenge."
  • Yoshi's Story also ends the game with the book closing.
  • Odin Sphere: The story of is contained within a series of books a young girl is reading one afternoon. Each character's New Game+ is simply Alice closing the book at the end and starting again from the beginning.
  • Kirbys Epic Yarn: Every cutscene is narrated like a storybook.
  • Valkyria Chronicles opens this way, and uses the book as a menu interface throughout. At the end, Ellet, the reporter following Squad 7 turns out to be the writer.
  • Castlevania 64 starts with the book already open on the a page holding the file select menu. Starting a new game results in your signature appearing on the document, and the pages flipping backwards to reveal it's a copy of the Necronomicon.
  • Grand Knights History
  • Chrono Cross
  • Wild ARMs'
  • Atelier Marie
  • Bram Stoker's Dracula for the SNES and Genesis has the player opening a book titled "Vampyres" and turning to a new page between levels. Unfortunately, there are no cutscenes.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • Winnie the Pooh: Disney's short subject versions take this to its logical conclusion by actually taking place in the book itself.
  • Rocky and Bullwinkle: The "Fractured Fairy Tales" segment used this, but played with it, with the fairy first having difficulty turning the pages due to her small size, then having the book slam shut on her.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: The first episode opened with one, telling the "old pony's tale" that sets the events of the series in motion.
  • Chowder: The opening credits, only instead of a storybook, it's a cookbook
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Storybook_Opening?oldid=1884301"