Disney’s latest Toy Story app doesn’t just want children to read and/or watch stories: it wants them to create some tales of their very own, using the characters from the Toy Story films.
Available for iPhone and iPad, Toy Story: Story Theater offers a range of scenery, from the Wild West and the Arctic to Outer Space, with digital stickers for characters and props.
The idea: children choose their setting and stickers, then animate their own tale by moving the latter around, and recording their own voice to tell the story.
The game has two modes: Story Play and Free Play. It’s best to start with the first of those, as it introduces the app’s main controls neatly.
It walks kids through the stages of creating a story using voice instructions rather than on-screen text – good if they’re not reading confidently yet – with a choice of three elements each time they have to make a decision.
So, they’ll start by choosing between Buzz, Woody and Jessie as their main character, and choose a place (Wild West, Outer Space or Arctic for example) before recording the introduction – moving the character about and/or pinching to change their size as they talk.
Then they choose an event – meteor shower, bank robber or hairy monster in our first go and record the character’s reaction in the same way, before choosing an action (lasoo, giant boulder or ‘flew’ for us) to record the finale.
At the end, they can pick a title and type it in (or get a parent to help) with their name, before watching their story back. Each story is also saved on the device for future viewing.
In the app’s Grown-Ups section, you can turn on a couple of extra elements for Story Play – ‘describe a character’ and ‘choose a feeling’, for a little bit more complexity to suit older kids.
Once the mechanics are grasped in Story Play mode, your kids will want to try Free Play mode, where they have free reign to choose characters (including others from the Toy Story universe), settings, events, music and actions and record their own one-scene adventures.
Disney encourages kids to try different combinations in the Story Play mode by locking some of the scenes in Free Play mode until they’ve recorded a certain number of Story Play stories – note, no in-app purchases are ever used in this app.
Meanwhile, the Grown-Ups section is hidden behind a three-digit PIN that’s spelt out in words when you tap on its homescreen icon (“Please enter the numbers: nine, two, three” for example). There, you can sign up to a mailing list about other Disney apps, and get ideas for offline activities that build on what kids have learned in the app.
We like Toy Story: Story Theater. You can tell that Disney has tried hard to keep it simple, so kids are making short stories rather than filming blockbuster epics – something that makes the app very accessible.
While the number of characters and settings may be limited, it’s your children’s imaginations that will stretch these elements into all kinds of interesting shapes.
Disney already has two other Story Theater apps available, one for its Disney Princesses and one for TV show Sofia the First. We’re guessing more classic Disney films may get the treatment in the coming months, if the first three apps are successful.
If so, one thing we’d love to see is a bit of cross-pollination: a Story Theater app where kids can put Disney characters from different films into the same stories, just like they play with different toys at once in the real world.
In the meantime, if your kids can’t get enough Toy Story – and show the inclination to make up their own mini-fables featuring Buzz, Woody and co – Toy Story: Story Theater is well worth the £1.99 you’ll pay for it on the App Store.
Download links
iPhone and iPad (£1.99)