I can’t stay away from the kids apps for too long. They’re just so darn cute.

Belindra is an animated storybook in the same ilk as The Little Red Hen and The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Cute story with cute animations, cute characters, and wrapped up with some good moral tidings for your child to take away as a life lesson. In a way, animated storybooks are the best bang for your buck in the iTunes store for your kids. They’re entertaining, they’re engaging, they’re educational, and, hopefully, they’ll make for an erudite child with all that exposure to reading. Of course, just how people debate the merits of Jane Austen over Charlotte Bronte, there too will be individual preferences within the world of children’s literature.

Belindra is a story about a family that harvests homegrown – most likely organic – vegetables and totes them in their vintage truck to places that need them. It’s a heartwarming story, with an obvious do-good morality to it, and places a heavy emphasis on the nourishing quality of vegetables. I was a little disappointed the story isn’t read aloud to the reader; instead, the story is scrunched into a top margin that unfortunately resembles the bland navigation bars seen in Windows Internet Explorer. The words are all very tiny, requiring you to narrow your eyes a bit, and for a story geared toward children, it’s too bad the font is not larger for young eyes to become familiar with the letters and words. It might also be difficult for young readers, with their small, clumsy fingers to flip the pages forward and backward when the buttons to do so are super tiny buttons labeled Next and Back in the upper right and left corners of the screen. The flipping mechanism present in The Little Red Hen mimics natural page turning, so a child may touch anywhere on screen, not limiting him to search for buttons that may not occur to his young mind, with words he may not be able to read yet. Young readers need all the help they can get, and I believe a narrated story and large words make large strides toward developing a child’s autonomy, especially if mother is busy, and the child is wanting to read on his own.

Navigation issues aside, it’s hard to beat the cuteness of Belindra, herself. With her oversized doll head, pert nose, and red, urban Merrell-esque hiking boots, she’s your contemporary liberal, green-leaning, back-to-nature role model (her mom wears what seem to be adirondack or duck boots). I bet if she were brought to life, even her t-shirt would be pigment dyed and made from organic or recycled hemp. Small cherry clusters are present on each page screen to indicate a character you may tap to animate, usually the mom waving her garden hoe with frenetic excitement, Belindra harriedly yanking cabbages from the ground and hurling them toward her truck bed, and their faithfully present orange tabby with a penchant for uttering a single, metallic, monotone “MROW,” his head abruptly nodding side to side. The animations are mostly jerky and amusing, with no sound, but I like how you can continually press them, over and over, until the mom has waved her garden hoe so much you half expect the drawing to suddenly break the hoe in half.

In the story, you follow Belindra and her mom as they bring vegetables to a restaurant, where the chefs chop onions into a stew (mirepoix, anyone?), and apparently use their vegetables in a yummy cake batter – I assume this to be carrot cake, but who knows? With Belindra and her vegetarian ways, it may very well be a vegan cake with beet or sweet potato puree. You can decide. Next, the trio heads to a Veggie Cookie Factory, where the workers amusingly pump out cookies from a funny looking mechanical contraption that wouldn’t look out of place in a Roald Dahl book. The veggies cookies come out from the lower end onto an assembly line belt where they…. look like whole vegetables stuck on a nondescript brown cookie. Okay, so the story leaves a little to be desired in the creative department, but at least it creates a pleasant correlation between the word “vegetable” and “dessert.” I rather liked how the Veggie Cookie Factory also makes fashion clothing, apparently, by ironing on whole carrots to the clothing, where they magically flatten into a graphic t-shirt version of themselves. I know I’m apprehensive about those de riguer, expensive faux leather shoe lines endorsed by Natalie Portman, and those $200 plus organic denim jeans that do nothing for you backside, so I just hope if I see someone walking around with a carrot emblem on a t-shirt it better have been made in the ironing-carrot way that Belindra showcases.

A small crisis occurs in the story where the ornery cat eats all the vegetables (no wonder he’s sick, the poor carnivore) and Belindra and her mom must rush back to harvest the last of their veggies, to jam pack them in the truck, and rush, vegetables flying out into the street, to a soup kitchen run by nuns (obviously, the only people who can outdo Belindra in her good deeds). After feeding the thankful homeless, Belindra and her mom return home where they ironically nosh on a cheesy, pepperoni delivery pizza, possibly the greatest antithesis to their healthy, homegrown vegetables they just delivered enthusiastically far and wide to everyone else.

The story could be better, the writing a little disjointed, and changes to the navigation and sounds could greatly improve this app. But, the morals are good, the characters sound and adorable, and any children’s story that encourages using vegetables is grand in my book, even if it means ending up with a pizza in the end.

If you feel like trying out Belindra for free, our treat, we at Appstruck have generously been provided with promo codes by the developer. Nab one before they’re all gone!

Promotion Codes:

AP66PK9PNELE

4KLXEWYNJXXX

*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.