It’s a good day for fairytale-lovers, what with Nosy Crow’s Little Red Riding Hood and now StoryToys’ pop-up retelling of Beauty and the Beast launching on the App Store.

We’ve written about StoryToys’ apps regularly: they take the form of virtual pop-up books, with a mixture of interactive scenes, elegantly-presented text and background music. Beauty and the Beast continues this on all fronts.

This time round, there are eight scenes to explore, from the prince’s transformation into a beast, through leaf-sorting, maze-wandering, escaping from a wolf and even playing ping-pong against the Beast.

(We don’t remember that from the original story, but there are very few fairytales that couldn’t be enlivened with a spot of whiff-whaff.)

We’ll be putting the app through its paces in a full review this week, but for now, Beauty and the Beast costs £2.99 on the App Store, and runs on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, with an Android version about to be released too (we’ll add a link when it goes live).

Here’s a teaser video: