For my second critique, I’ve chosen to focus on Natasha Osterwalder’s Remix of “The Story of Cinderella”.

The first time I looked at this project, I have to admit it didn’t completely catch my attention (this was the first time when I was going through everybody’s projects to see what everyone had done). I read her explanation of the project (taking the illustrations from an old version of Cinderalla, and setting them to her own original story), but I didn’t really think about what that meant she was actually doing. Unfortunately this resulted in my quickly flipping through the pages, taking for granted that the story she came up with would still have presumably been some form of the Cinderella story as we know it. I am glad, therefore, that I went back and looked at it more carefully, as it turns out that she did something very interesting with this.

Essentially, she created an original Cinderalla story that was essentially the polar opposite of the normal version. In her telling, Cinderella starts out as a rich woman, and through a series of events, she ends up as a poor servant. What makes this remix project work so effectively though is the multiple dimensions in which her use of the original illustrations works here. First, she basically took the images at face value, but picked them perfectly to fit her new version of the story. And secondly, she essentially used the images in reverse. I think this is especially interesting from a remix perspective because it gives the story new meaning to see the illustrations in reverse, and it emphasizes the way she has changed things.

I think that’s what I find so fascinating about how she remixed the work here. She remixed the story to reverse it, and she remixed the illustrations by reversing them as well. In doing so, she goes much further than one might expect. Thinking about how I might have done this if I had tried something similar, I have to admit I don’t think it would have occurred to me to reverse/shuffle the order of illustrations to fit them into the story. I think I would have ended up taking the less interesting and more basic approach of keeping the illustrations in their proper order, but depending solely on the text of the original story to give them new meaning. In terms of ideas I’d like to appropriate or steal, I think Natasha has established a great framework for all sorts of interesting possibilities for remixing a work. I think pretty much any illustrated work (either a children’s book, or a comic book/graphic novel) could be remixed in interesting ways using the device she uses here. It’s not uncommon to see people do the basic level remixing (i.e. replacing the text in word balloons of a comic strip), but to then also reverse or reshuffle the illustrations too really introduces a new set of possibilities.

Fundamentally I think that’s what is interesting here, and would love to try myself sometime – combining illustrations (or even perhaps scenes from a movie), reordered so they are in reverse order or out of sequence, and then coming up with a new story using not just the illustrations/scenes but their new order as a device for creating a totally new story that plays off of the reader/viewer’s familiarity with the subject matter being remixed, both its story and visual aspects.

And again, it’s interesting to use this device for a “known” story like Cinderella. Certainly part of its effectiveness is that we recognize what the story is “supposed to be”, so the reimagining of what each illustration represents is more effective. This device probably wouldn’t work as well if you picked some obscure 19th century children’s book no-one had ever heard of.

In terms of criticisms, it’s hard to really say. As I mentioned at the beginning, the biggest “flaw” I could see in this project would be that other people might fall victim to the same mistaken assumption I did – namely, assuming we already understood what was going on here based just on the description. I assumed initially that it was just going to be some variation that followed the same rules as the Cinderella story, and of course the project was much more than that. I’m thinking perhaps I would try and do something on the intro page and even title of the work to really explicitly make it clear that this is something different…… even something that summarized the new approach, so we know we’re not just getting the standard story. Although that may or may not be a good idea in practice; if one were to do that, it might ruin some of the “surprise” that you get once you do realize what is going on.

So, in the end, the only criticism I could have is that it depends on the reader paying attention and not making assumptions about what they’re getting into – or at least giving it a chance and not letting their assumptions make them think they’ve already “gotten” it.

Overall though, a really interesting work, and one that has given me a lot of ideas for things to try in the future.