Transmedia Storytelling – Henry Jenkins

Transmedia Storytelling was discussed by Henry Jenkins in his 2006 book, Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide: “A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole”. (p. 97-98).

Jenkins discusses how The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999), The Matrix: Reloaded (Wachowski & Wachowski, 2003a), and The Matrix Revolutions (Wachowski & Wachowski, 2003b) were one of the first examples of such storytelling, as to fully understand the subtle, but critical, details of the films, viewers would have to also see The Animatrix (Chung, Jones & Kawajiri, 2003), play the video game Enter the Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 2003c) and read the accompanying books and comics.

Using this method of storytelling may cause more confusion than immersion, however. “Critical reception of the films focused on the tangled narrative, apparent plot holes, undeveloped tangents, and shallow characters” (Elkington, 2009, p. 220) with audiences being left confused if they are not fully immersed.

Intertextuality is “a term to indicate that all texts, whether written or spoken, whether formal or informal, whether artistic or mundane, are in some ways related to each other.” (Van Zoonen, 2017, p. 1). Van Zoonen details “the obvious example being books made into movies or the other way around.” (p. 1), but also points out this relationship can stretch even further than just books and movies: “Disney content is the ultimate example with ‘brands’ like Pocahontas produced as film, book, game, costumes, bed linen, bread boxes, mugs and more.” (p. 1).

Whilst discussing a negative viewpoint of the Harry Potter film series, Berit Kjos shows another example of intertextuality:

Aplication and Analysis

An example of transmedia storytelling in recent years is that of the Star Wars character Mitth’raw’nuruodo (Thrawn). Before Disney bought Lucasfilm, the character had been well developed in several novels by its creator / author, Timothy Zahn, but had never appeared within the Star Wars Cinematic Universe. When the buyout happened, Disney drew a line between the Star Wars films and the many novels which expanded the stories (literally called the ‘Expanded Universe’). This enabled a continuity between Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983) and Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015). (For example, in the expanded universe, Chewbacca had been killed off, Luke Skywalker had married the Emperor’s ‘hand’, and Leia became a Jedi – all three detailed storylines which would break the continuity in The Force Awakens).

The character of Thrawn had to be reinvented within the context of the Disney timeline, and three novels were published: Thrawn (Zahn, 2017), Thrawn: Alliances (Zahn, 2018), and Thrawn: Treason (Zahn, 2019).

The character was also introduced into the animated series Star Wars: Rebels (Filoni, 2014-2018), with a cliff-hanger ending of the final episode. Thrawn: Treason ended with Thrawn heading out to deal with the Rebels – the novels and TV series are this example of transmedia storytelling where the endings of both texts converge.

Another example is a relationship between Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Johnson, 2017) and Star Wars: Battlefront II (DICE, 2017). In a cutscene in Battlefront II, you see Luke Skywalker collecting a device which is revealed to be a key plot element of The Last Jedi. Watching The Last Jedi without this context leaves questions as to how the character obtained it – those questions of course answered with knowledge of the video game.