The Three Pigs Review

 The Three Pigs

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wiesner, D. (2001). The Three Pigs. Clarion Books. ISBN:  978-1-42873-774-7

PLOT SUMMARY

Author David Wiesner says he wanted to give the pigs a book of their own after writing Caldecott winner Tuesday. Beginning as the traditional fairy tale of The Three Little Pigs, this Caldecott winner takes a pivot when the wolf blows the first pig out of the picture and the story. The other pigs also leave their story and visit other fairy tale stories. Chaos ensues with each turn of the page until the pictures no longer match up. They bring the friends they made back to their repaired story into the brick house to eat soup and live happily ever after. 

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

This version of The Three Pigs is a North American fractured fairy tale will with a happy ending. The pigs are portrayed as the good guys and the wolf clings to his usual role of the bad guy. The fractures begin when the wolf blows the first pig out of the pages and they fly the paper airplane to nursery rhymes. After the pages say the wolf ate the pigs, the audience now knows that it’s not true and the wolf is just misunderstood. The illustration style changes throughout the book with the first pages as 2D, then 3D, and more back and forth between until the end. 

REVIEW EXCERPT(S)

Booklist starred (May 15, 2001 (Vol. 97, No. 18))

Ages 6-9. Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (1989) turned the favorite porkers' story upside-down by allowing the grossly misjudged wolf to tell his side of the story. Wiesner's latest is a post-modern fantasy for young readers that takes Scieszka's fragmentation a step further: it not only breaks apart and deliciously reinvents the pigs' tale, it invites readers to step beyond the boundaries of story and picture book altogether. The book begins predictably: the three pigs set out to seek their fortune, and when the first pig builds a house of straw, the wolf blows it down. Here's when the surprises start. The wolf blows the pig right out of the picture and out of the story itself. In the following frames, the story continues as expected: the wolf eats the pig and moves on to the other houses. But the pictures no longer match up. Frames show the bewildered wolf searching hungrily through the rubble as first one, then all the pigs escape the illustrations and caper out into open space with the loose pages of the wolf's tale swirling around them. After fashioning a paper airplane from a passing page, the emancipated pigs soar off on a sort of space flight through blank white spreads, ultimately discovering other picture-book "planets" along the way. Finally, the pigs wander through a near-city of illustrated pages, each suggesting its own story. Joined by the nursery rhyme Cat and Fiddle and a fairy-tale dragon, the pigs find and reassemble the pages to their own story and reenter to find the wolf still at the door. In the end, the story breaks down altogether, as the wolf flees, the text breaks apart, letters spill into a waiting basket, and the animals settle down to a bowl of . . . alphabet soup instead of wolf stew. Wiesner uses shifting, overlapping artistic styles to help young readers envision the pigs' fantastical voyage. The story begins in a traditional, flat, almost old-fashioned illustrative style. But once the first pig leaps from the picture's frame, he becomes more shaded, bristly with texture, closer to a photographic image. As the pigs travel and enter each new story world, they take on the style of their surroundings--the candy-colored nursery rhyme, the almost comic-book fairy tale--until, in the end, they appear as they did at the beginning. Chatty dialogue balloons also help guide children through the story, providing most of the text once the characters leave the conventional story frames, and much of the humor ("Let's get out of here!" yells one pig as he leaps from a particularly saccharine nursery world). Despite all these clues, children may need help understanding what's happening, particularly with the subtle, open-ended conclusion. But with their early exposure to the Internet and multimedia images, many kids will probably be comfortable shifting between frames and will follow along with delight. Wiesner has created a funny, wildly imagined tale that encourages kids to leap beyond the familiar, to think critically about conventional stories and illustration, and perhaps to flex their imaginations and create wonderfully subversive versions of their own stories.

CONNECTIONS

Read another variation of The Three Pigs and complete a Venn diagram

Students can create their own Nursery Rhymes

In the activity below, students would cut out and sequence the story with a visualized sketch for each scene.

Related books:

Browne, A. The Tunnel. ISBN: 039484582X

Grey, M. The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon. ISBN: 978-0375836916