The Three Pigs

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Bibliography

Wiesner, David.  The Three Pigs.  New York: Clarion Books, 2001.  0329279815

Summary

What starts out as a traditional telling of The Three Little Pigs quickly takes an unexpected turn when the wolf unknowingly blows the first little pig completely out of the story. The pig takes full advantage of this situation and quickly finds his brothers, bringing them to safety and leaving the wolf in the story frames, hungry and confused.  The pigs find that they are not limited to their own story and venture through a number of different tales, collecting friends along the way.

Analysis

The Three Pigs takes fractured fairy tales to a whole new level.  Not just changing the viewpoint of the narrator or putting a cultural spin on the story, this book challenges readers to think outside the box, literally and figuratively.  Playing on his strengths as an illustrator, Wiesner seamlessly blends small amounts of dialog with stunning illustrations.  The pictures truly do steal the show and are capable of telling the story in such a way that the dialog seems superfluous. 

Young and old alike are able to enjoy this story.  Younger readers enjoy the adventures of the pigs; making and flying on paper airplanes, befriending a dragon and running across familiar faces, such as the cat from Hey Diddle Diddle.  Older readers enjoy seeing the pigs transition from looking realistic to cartoonish as they wander through the pages, finding illustrations from other Wiesner books, and imagining the pigs tumbling through the world Wiesner has created using story book pages. 

When reading this book aloud to a second grade class, they weren’t able to stay seated or simply listen.  “Look at the pigs, they’re changing!” they would shout out as the pigs moved from story to story.  The pages where the pigs were flying on the airplane were met with many ooohs and ahhhhs.  When one of the pigs appeared to look out from the book and stated “I think…someone’s out there,” he was met with a chorus of hellos and waves.  They stated this was now one of their favorite books. 

Awards and Reviews

*Caldecott Medal, 2001

“David Wiesner’s postmodern interpretation of this tale plays imaginatively with traditional picture book and story conventions and with readers’ expectations of both. (Though with Wiesner, we should know by now to expect the unexpected.) Astute readers will notice the difference between the cover’s realistic gouache portrait of the three pigs (who stare directly out at the viewer with sentient expressions) and the simple outlined watercolor artwork on the title page. In fact, the style of the illustrations and the way the characters are rendered shifts back and forth a few times before the book is done, as Wiesner explores the possibility of different realities within a book’s pages. The text, set in a respectable serif typeface, begins by following the familiar pattern—pigs build houses, wolf huffs and puffs, wolf eats two pigs, etc. But while the text natters on obliviously, the pigs actually step (or are huffed and puffed) out of the muted-color panel illustrations without being eaten…Wiesner may not be the first to thumb his nose at picture-book design rules and storytelling techniques, but he puts his own distinct print on this ambitious endeavor. There are lots of teaching opportunities to be mined here—or you can just dig into the creative possibilities of unconventionality.” –K.F., The Horn Book

“Satisfying both as a story and as an exploration of the nature of story, The Three Pigs takes visual narrative to a new level. Dialogue balloons, text excerpts, and a wide variety of illustration styles guide the reader through a dazzling fantasy universe to the surprising and happy ending.

Fans of Tuesday's Frog's and Sector 7's clouds will be captivated by old friends the Three Pigs of nursery fame and their companions in a new guise.” -Scholastic

Connections

Building a background from the few pages from the dragon’s story seen in The Three Pigs, students will write a continuation telling how the story would have gone, had the pigs not stolen the dragon away.

Wiesner's Caldecott acceptance speech.

Students could write a letter asking the pigs to save a character from another story and justifying why the character should be saved. 

In The Three Pigs, the pigs made friends with the other characters they met.  Write the names of other folktale characters on slips of paper and put them into a basket.  After students draw two names, they will write a story or comic showing what happens when the characters met after being pulled out of their stories.