On-demand stories are the newest provocation by Netflix. From now on, users will be able to rewrite both the end and the actions of characters and Puss in Boots will be the first interactive story, maybe as a homage to the historic headquarters of Los Gatos in California. Not the one from Grimm Brothers but the feline with the voice of Antonio Banderas and made popular by Shrek.
Videogames are the models of inspiration but while this experimentation rewrites the children’s old passion for stories with a new language and reshapes the results depending on their personal preferences, it also leads to confusion. The first and most immediate confusion concerns the effect of the removal of a habit based on the comforting repetition on younger children even if many people highlight that this is happening at school for years: many classic fables, for instance, are rewritten in an anti-sexist key such as Cinderella, where roles are reversed and the protagonist is no longer just beautiful.
Anna Antonazzi, Professor of Children’s Literature at the University of Genoa, supports the application of such operations because “this is natural in the children’s cross-media universe. We adults struggle to accept the betrayal of stories that accompany us forever”.
