"Oh, no, no, not the book. How many have seen "opening the book" before? (screech) Close the book; we're not doing that."
A common device to start a story, especially adaptations of fairy tales, is with a storybook opening up, usually accompanied by Opening Narration (often with the formula "Once Upon a Time..."), and then the book's (usually illustrated) pages are replaced with the film's scenes of the story itself being played out, giving the impression of the narrative coming to life. 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.
With the advent of comic-book film/TV adaptations, the use of comic art was introduced as a variant of this trope. Comics count as books too.
A subtrope of Framing Device. A sister trope of the one where the book is shown as it is being written. The Fake Film Intro can be considered a more technologically-advanced form of this, if used for exposition. See also Myth Prologue, and if the storybook plays a role throughout the narrative, it may have an Indecisive Medium instead.
Not to be confused with Plot-Triggering Book, when a book becomes a plot element In-Universe.
Examples:
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Advertising
- One Empire Today commercial (boasting dialogue inspired by Goldilocks) does this with a book of carpet samples, reading "Once upon a time..." on the front.
Asian Animation
- The first episode from the first season of Miniforce begins with a book opening, and a narrator reading the story in the book. It explains why the Miniforce was started and how they still exist after thousands of years.
Films — Animation
- The Adventures of Mark Twain begins with a variant where the contents of an opened storybook spill out and form the world.
- The Amazing Maurice opens like this ... except the story is Mr Bunnsy Has an Adventure. After a few sentences, Character Narrator Malicia slams it shut and says this isn't a story about cute bunnies, it's a story about RATS! While Malicia reading Mr Bunnsy is returned to on several occasions, the last scene is Maurice closing The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
- The Book of Life: The museum guide opens the titular Book of Life and begins telling the children the main story. At the very end of the movie, Candlemaker closes the book and tells the audience, "Write your own ending."
- A Christmas Carol (2009): The film opens with the original 1843 novella by Charles Dickens opening up to start the story, specifically focusing on the book's iconic opening sentence, "Marley was dead: to begin with..." to transition to the scene showing Scrooge at the funeral of his late business partner, Jacob Marley.
- The Christmas Tree is a textbook example. The storybook doesn't have words or even word-shaped scribbles, just the kind of colored Tetris-like blocks that frequently showed up in low-budget animation before the All-CGI Cartoon became common.
- Corpse Bride subverts the trope: the film starts with a book opening and someone drawing and writing with a feather and ink in it, but it turns out to be Victor, the male protagonist, before the events happen.
- Disney Animated Canon examples, in chronological order:
- As mentioned above, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the Trope Maker.
- Pinocchio.
- "Aquarela do Brasil," the fourth and last segment of Saludos Amigos, opens with a book of artwork while displaying the credits (although the segment itself commences on an artist's canvas).
- Both segments of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.
- Cinderella.
- Sleeping Beauty.
- The Sword in the Stone.
- The Jungle Book.
- Robin Hood.
- The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh constantly reminds you that the characters are in a book. From bumping into the words on the page, to hopping from one page to the next. When Tigger gets stuck in a tree, he's saved by the narrator, who simply turns the book sideways, allowing him to slide down the letters.
- The Prince and the Pauper (Animated featurette shown in theaters before the theatrical release of The Rescuers Down Under)
- Beauty and the Beast uses a variation, with stained-glass illustrations on the Beast's castle windows instead of a book.
- Pocahontas opens with artwork on parchment that transitions into the animation, and it ends the same way in reverse.
- Hercules has another variation, with Greek pottery art that comes to life.
- Mulan's variation involves the main titles being represented as the scene painted on traditional Chinese watercolour art. There were plans to do a more straightforward (though extremely elaborate) use of the trope involving shadow puppetry, but it was scrapped for being too costly.
- The trope's usage was defied and lampshaded by Chicken Little; the film 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.
- 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.
- Strange World: After brief video retro footage detailing the world, a comic book called The Adventure of the Clades is opened introducing the Clade family and main plot. At the end, the book closes with a new cover and now titled Strange World.
- Wish: The film begins with one, with illustrations done in the style of Eyvind Earle's drawings for Sleeping Beauty (1959).
- Fantastic Mr. Fox: The film opens with the Roald Dahl novel, which fades into the opening scene.
- 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.
- 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.
- Another Don Bluth film, The Pebble and the Penguin, actually did this with a songbook.
- 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.
- Rupert and the Frog Song opens with a live-action scene in which Paul McCartney is rummaging through a trunk of old Rupert annuals, apparently from his childhood. He leafs through one of the books, and the scene transitions to Nutwood.
- Shrek:
- Subverted by Shrek, which opens with the title character reading a Fairy Tale... and then ripping out a page as toilet paper.
- Played surprisingly straight in Shrek 2, but even that turns out to be a setup for a gag that kicks off the rest of the film's plot.
- None of this appears in "Shrek the Third" and "Pussin Boots(2011)".
- Used again in Shrek Forever After, with multiple pages being ripped off in frustration by the villain, Rumpelstiltskin.
- The Smurfs and the Magic Flute starts off with a book page that the narrator reads "once upon a time" until he decides to tell the story without resorting to using a book and just turns the page to the picture of the king's castle that the camera zooms into.
- Steven Universe: The Movie opens on a storybook recapping Steven and his mother's history with the gem Homeworld through Steven Universe. It turns out the book was being shown in-series on an intergalactic broadcast, which is how Spinel found out Pink Diamond wasn't coming back for her. An actual version of the storybook was made as a tie-in, written by the series' creator.
- Strange Magic starts with a scroll being opened to show the map of the Fairy Kingdom and the Dark Forest while the opening narration explains the setting.
- Teen Titans Go! To the Movies opened this way, parodying the Marvel logo with Teen Titan comic pages, zooming out to reveal a seagull reading a Teen Titan comic.
- Thumbelina (1994): After the narrator, Jacquimo, arrives at the library and presents a much smaller book compared to all the other ones (small just like the protagonist of its story], which is opened and begins the story, and also the same one that closes at the end of the story.
- Wizards opens with a live-action shot of a hardcover book opened to its first page, which reads "An illuminating history bearing on the everlasting struggle for world supremacy fought between the powers of technology and magic." This segues into an illustrated prologue drawn by Mike Ploog. Strangely, the book's page is printed using the E13B font, a machine-readable style that predates optical character recognition.
Films — Live-Action
- In 2002, Marvel debuted a production logo made of flipping comic pages. The comic intro has proven extremely popular, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe making its own version that incorporates scripts and concept art.
- DC Comics utilized a production logo with comic art from 2005 to 2011 for its films in those periods — The Dark Knight Trilogy, Superman Returns, Jonah Hex (2010), The Losers (2010) and Green Lantern (2011).
- Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) opens in this style.
- Used in the Laurel and Hardy version of Babes in Toyland, but cut from many prints. Mother Goose sings a song about Toyland and flips the pages of a book that shows all the main characters in live action, ending with Stan and Ollie.
- Bedtime Story (1964) opens with a popup book showing some of the movie's locations, with Freddy shown as a wolf spying on a woman from behind a tree.
- The Disney Channel original movie Descendants "modernizes" this using a computer tablet in its opening.
- In the extended version of David Lynch's Dune, one of the first shots after the opening credits is a shot of a copy of the original book by Frank Herbert.
- Elf not only has a storybook in its prologue, opening credits, and closing scene, but the menus on the DVD resemble pop-up books.
- Used in Enchanted, for both the opening and the closing. Fittingly, the song that ends the movie opens with a line about "storybook endings".
- Godmothered: In the beginning, a book called "The Joy of Fairy Godmothering" opens to a page with clouds on it, which then part to reveal the film's first scene.
- Gods of Egypt: The film opens with carvings of Egyptian deities, which fades into the opening.
- Used in the 1937 Shirley Temple version of Heidi for the opening credits and first paragraph.
- The 2016 version of The Jungle Book doesn't have a storybook opening, but it does have a storybook closing, with the book being the very same one that opened the original animated classic.
- 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 Quest doesn't have a Storybook Opening, but ends with a Storybook Closing for some inexplicable reason.
- The Return of Sherlock Holmes opens with a shot of The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which opens to display the cast list for the film.
- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows opens and closes with the pages of Dr Watson's journal where he narrates the prologue/epilogue of the film. The pages are also filled with images from the film and passages from Doyle's Holmes novels.
- In The Smurfs 2, Narrator uses a pop-up book to tell the story of how Smurfette came to be at the beginning of the movie.
- Snow White (2025) uses this, with friendly woodland animals opening and closing it. The book has the cover in French ("Blanches Neiges"), homaging the faiytale's popularity in France.
- Snow White and the Three Stooges opens this way, with the Stooges having fun at points.
- Thirteen Women begins with a copy of the novel on which it is based opening to show a page explaining about the power of suggestion, complete with references to a psychology journal. The movie proper then starts.
- Each of the segments in the Anthologyfilm Twice-Told Tales begins with a pair of skeletal hands opening opening a book to reveal the title of the story while Vincent Price starts a narration as the page fades into the actual scene.
- Les Visiteurs II: The Corridors of Time starts with a recap of the events of the first film in storybook form narrated by Vincent Grass (who did the Opening Monologue of the first film). Muriel Robin replaces Valérie Lemercier as Dame Frénégonde and Béatrice in it.
- Wes Anderson utilizes this method a lot in his films, eg The French Dispatch using different issues of a newspaper and The Grand Budapest Hotel being a book that opens the narrative. Also see Fantastic Mr. Fox above, which Anderson co-directed.
Live-Action TV
- During the 1970s and 1980s, this was the introduction
to the Soap Opera All My Children, only it was a photo album rather than a book. The 1990's updated it with a slew of photographs falling into the album before closing it.
- In the second season of Evil (2019), each episode is framed by a page from a children's book called "The Pop-Up Book of Terrifying Things", which is alphabet themed, with each pop-up presenting a different letter. Each episode takes its name from one of the entries.
- 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".
- Monk uses this for the summation in the last episode of season 3, "Mr. Monk and the Kid".
- The intro to My Special Book features Book Girl emerging from behind a giant book, the main setting of the series, and inviting the viewers to join her before opening the book.
- The "Gingerbread" episode of Taggart used this. (The story was loosely inspired by Hansel and Gretel).
- Wonder Woman (1975) used comic art in its title sequences.
- PBS's "Masterpiece" opened this way for many years, usually surrounded by cast photos and and artifacts relating to the shows featured on the series.
Theatre
- When it first opened, the 2013 musical adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had an animated opening sequence about the making of chocolate that began this way (the book a large, purple one with a golden W on the cover). The narrator began with the lines "This is a story about the most important thing in the world: Chocolate." This sequence was cut in 2014 with the first cast turnover, possibly for pacing reasons.
- The filmed-for-Youtube version of Cinderella's Castle opens this way.
Video Games
- The opening cinematics of Arabian Fight depicts a bound book resembling a Quran opening. Cue the game starting.
- Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean: The intro cutscene shows a book, titled "The History of Baten Kaitos: Endless Wings and the Lost Sea", which opens to briefly go over the world's backstory.
- The opening of The Binding of Isaac plays out much like a bedtime story, with child-style illustrations of what is going on.
- 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. However, there are no cutscenes.
- Brave Hero Yuusha: The storybook is called The Hero & The Demon.
- Castlevania 64 starts with the book already open on 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.
- Castle of Heart begins with a grimoire opening, followed by an animated montage of the game's backstory. The final stage concludes with the grimoire closing.
- Cuphead opens with a live-action storybook cutscene explaining Cuphead's situation, and closes out the same way.
- Eternity: The Last Unicorn begins with the Alfheim Grimoire opening, followed by the backstory's narration before it segues into gameplay.
- The PlayStation Portable port of Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions opens with a variation after the player names and chooses Ramza's birthday. It opens with Arazlam Durai opening a map scroll of Ivalice as part of him uncovering the Durai Papers (the Framing Device for the story, which shows how Ramza is the real hero of the story, even after being branded a heretic by the Church of Glabados), which transitions into the prologue of the game itself.
- The old Crystal Dynamics game The Horde does this.
- Kirby's Epic Yarn: Every cutscene is presented as a storybook, with anything not from the yarn world presented as a paper cutout. It's also narrated by a calm and soothing audiobook-style voice.
- The Legend of Tian-ding has a Manhua opening with the game's poster recreated on the front of a comic book. It then opens and segues into the first stage.
- The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes: The intoduction story showing how Princess Styla got cursed to wear a drab outfit is told through a storybook. The end credits also end with the same book.
- Lords of Magic starts off with a book opening that narrates the rise of the dark lord Balkoth and how he disrupted the previously peaceful land of Urak.
- MapleStory originally had a login screen which was the first page in a book.
- 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.
- Odin Sphere: The game's story is contained within a series of books a young girl is reading one afternoon. Each character's New Game Plus is simply Alice closing the book at the end and starting again from the beginning.
- Radical Dreamers: This Super Nintendo Stellaview 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.
- The events of Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty are told via a book from Rusty Pete towards Captain Slag, both of whom narrate the story.
- Resident Evil Village opens on a story titled "Village of Shadows", framed in the context of Mia telling the story to Ethan and their infant daughter, Rose. This story is rife with Foreshadowing, as the locations and the monsters reference the Four Houses and their lords and how the daughter being kidnapped by the witch references Miranda's kidnapping of Rose. The ending of the game finishes this story by showing the fight between the father and the witch that culminates in the former giving up his life to protect his daughter, mirroring how Ethan fought Miranda and his Heroic Sacrifice destroying the Megamycete to protect Rose and Mia.
- Skully starts with a book with Skully on it's front cover flipping open, which leads to the title screen. After Skully's Heroic Sacrifice and with Terry making amends with his siblings, the book then closes before the credits.
- Slashout has a Storybook Closing, capping on a screenshot of the four victorious heroes after the credits finish rolling.
- Soul Edge's 'Edge Master Mode' had each character's journey represented as the pages of a book. Rather than the ending videos as shown when Arcade Mode was completed, it would be shown via illustrations in the book.
- Super Mario Bros.
- Yoshi's Story features a pop-up storybook. The opening scene presents the first several pages introducing the story. During gameplay, the page turns for each new world. At the end, the storybook reviews all six worlds, the final pages present a happy ending, and the book closes.
- Paper Mario: The first four games begin with a book opening and the narrator informing the player what "Today's story" is going to be. Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam played with it by revealing the Paper Mario world really is held within a book in the regular Mario universe... and having the characters escape.
- Super Mario Galaxy 2 shows one of these when starting a new file, and during the credits. At the end, it is revealed that Rosalina had been narrating it as well as the whole game. The end scene also transitions into the Green Star Challenge.
- Ultraverse Prime, befitting an arcade game based on a comic book, starts with a shot of the book's cover featuring the titular hero. The game then enters the book when the player hit start.
- 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.
Web Animation
- Stupid Kids: Ahol a méreg sem segít (Where even poison does not help) begins with a picture book opening along with a narrator.
- Zero Punctuation did this with the review of Red Faction: Guerrilla.
Western Animation
- Every episode of The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 opens with the brothers opening up an album in their plumbing shop in Brooklyn, reflecting on their time in the Mushroom Kingdom.
- Used in The Backyardigans episode "The Secret of Snow", the only episode to not begin with an aerial of the backyard.
- Chowder: The opening credits, only instead of a storybook, it's a cookbook.
- The Clifford the Big Red Dog television series opens and closes each episode this way. Justified as the TV series is actually based on a set of books.
- Ferdinand the Bull didn't have one originally, but it was retroactively added in the 1950s when it was broadcast on Walt Disney's television show.
- Hazbin Hotel begins with Princess Charlie reading ''The Story of Hell''.
- The 30-minute adaptation of The Little Engine That Could opened and closed this way.
- Looney Tunes: Three Little Bops opens with a shot of the cover of the storybook of The Three Little Pigs, before cross-fading into showing the Pigs as bebop jazz musicians "playing music with a modern sound".
- Winnie the Pooh: Disney's short subject versions take this to its logical conclusion by actually taking place in the book itself.
- 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.
- The show's final episode ends with the same book from the first episode closing at the very end of the song, "The Magic of Friendship Grows". After the book closes, it shines with a ding sound effect.
- The first Season Finale of The Owl House starts with one of these, as King reads aloud from an illustrated book about Emperor Belos' rise to power.
- Rocky and Bullwinkle: Played with in one "Fractured Fairy Tales" segment, with the fairy first having difficulty turning the pages due to her small size, then having the book slam shut on her.
- Thomas & Friends used this during the HiT era.
- The VeggieTales episode "Lyle the Kindly Viking" opens with Archibald reading the story from a pop-up book.