We have sequels, when a story picks up where the previous story left off (in most cases anyway), and we have prequels, when the action supposedly takes place prior to the action in the original work. The other day I thought of another type of “-quel” but I am not sure if there is a word for it or if it occurs with sufficient regularity to warrant having a name for it. Is there a word for a type of story that is told within the same time frame as its original with the same events taking place, but the story is told or shown from the perspective of a different character? Are there any examples of this in film or print (barring fan fiction and other non-official works?)
It’s called a meanwhile, back at the ranch-quel. 
I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but “Rashomon” is the archetype for that type of story. CSI and ER have both done Rashomon type episodes, and the 1964 movie “The Outrage” used the technique.
I’ve seen it called a Paralell [Franchise/Series/Movies, etc], obviously referring to the paralell timelines. It’s mostly used in one movie though, in the style of Pulp Fiction, but also for simulverse movies of the kind you’re thinking about. It’s also frequently used in TV-series, books and comics, but I haven’t seen a specific word for it.
Those are known as midquels. The direct-to-video Lion King 1 1/2 and the book Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire are a few of the better known examples.
That Simpsons episode where Homer gets his thumb cut off and where Lisa creates that grammar robot for her science fair is a good example.
He Loves Me He Loves Me Not sort of does this. The movie Go kinda does. Oddly enough, an episode of Good Times does it as well.
Wasn’t The Animatrix also a midquel?
I don’t think Rashomon (or The Outrage, which is a western-style remake of Rashomon) really count – those are cases of retelling the story several times within the original from different points of view. The OP is asking for cases where different movies (or books) tell the same story from another point of view. Like Hamlet and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
There are plenty of cases of this. Lots of novels have been written taking some classic story and telling it from nsome other characters’ point of view. Like Fred Saberhagen;s The Dracula Tapes (and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula). Or Robert A, Heinlein’s To Sail Beyond the Sunset and his own Time Enough for Love (at least, parts of those books overlap)
You could make the case for **Back to the Future I ** and II being this as well.
I’m suire there are classier examples, but I can’t think of any right now. Didmn’t someone write a Heathcliff to answer Wuthering Heights?
In case you’re interested, there was a TV series where the action was shown from several viewpoints in a single episode.
(It was a police series, but I don’t remember the name :o )
Disregard mine above then- I also misread that the OP was about Rashomon type films.
It was.
And, according to Wiki, it appears midquel has been split up into three new terms: interquel (a story between two movies/books), midquel (a story happening during a gap in one story) and parallel (same time period but new characters, which was also mentioned in this thread).
There doesn’t really seem to be much difference between the three and a lot of examples straddle two or more definitions (Shadows of the Empire, for example, uses new characters in the same time period and is a story between two movies/books).
Boom something.
Boomtown?
A good example would be Orson Scott Card’s Bean books. They first book takes place over the same time period as “Ender’s Game”, but from the POV of Bean.
I’ve seen this talked about as parallel stories.
On stage, the most clever example is the “Norman Conquests” trilogy by Alan Ayckbourne. It consists of three plays: Table Manners, Living Together and Round and Round the Garden. The three plays show the events of the same weekend in the dining room, living room, and garden (respectively) of one house. When a character is offstage in one play, another play shows what he is doing.
Aykbourne later expanded the conception in House & Garden, which not only shows two views of the events of a weekend, but is designed so that the two plays can run simultaneously.
Kurt Busiek’s Marvels graphic novel was a look at the events in the Marvel comic universe from the point of view of a news photographer, Phil Sheldon, who can only get glimpses of the action.
I’ve always heard them called “re-imaginings” as in “Spindle’s End, the re-imagining of the classic fairy tale, “Sleeping Beauty…”” or “Wicked, the tale of the Wizard of Oz reimagined!”
Yes Boomtown. But not completely. I started a thread long ago about shows like this that voluntarily dumb themselves down in order to try and save themselves. sort of a purposeful jumping the shark. Boomtown did this. It started off with a very complex structure. The end was never clear since the plot was presented from different viewpoints and it jumped back and forth in the timeline. I loved it. The rest of America did not. They changed the show to a more conventional format and it continued to get low ratings so it didn’t last long.
Would something like Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima be an example of this?
I remember that ep but I think that’s a different category – where the same sequence of events is recounted very differently by several characters, each making him/herself comparatively shine. Distinguishable from what the OP describes in that the variant versions are not only from different POVs but flatly factually incompatible. It’s a common sitcom technique – I’ve seen it in The Tony Randall Show and Carter Country – and I also remember it done once in an episode of Magnum: P.I. Whether it has a name I do not know.