| Summary: | Children’s literatures presently are produced widely through media production either as
remediation of printed stories or originally produced in digital form. The current most sought
after digitized communicative practice of the media is the digital children’s picture book app
due to its multimediality and interactivity. This quality of the picture book app paves the path
for an aesthetic and cultural transformative exchange. However, these digital children’s picture
book apps have been found to contain diversity and multicultural gaps. Furthermore, the noncognitive/
affective quality of these interactive digital book apps that is evoked through senses
like touch, hearing and sight needs further investigation. Hence, through a qualitative
approach, the digital children’s picture book app version of the Malaysian animated series
Upin and Ipin: Storybook: The Rain and The Sea Part 1 was selected as case study for this
paper. Selection criteria consisted of three aspects; narration being in English and contained
Semiotic Technology i.e. digitized meaning-making modes, the contents reflect characters,
symbols and narratives that portray Malaysian culture, history and identity. The research
reveals a postcolonial aesthetic that extensively operates based on the ideologies of the
dominant class or culture through the representations of ethnic nationalism. This shows a builtin
intrinsic value according to the context of the dominant culture that can be found in the
aesthetic engagement in the transcultural space of this picture book app. This article
contributes to scholarship cross-cultural engagement in the affective space of postcolonial
digital picture books.
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