The Three Little Pigs by David Wiesner

Spotlight on Traditional Tales

The Three Little Pigs by David Wiesner

The three pigs working to build their new houses, the wolf and his huffing and puffing…we know the story.  But, you haven’t heard this one!  Let’s shine the spotlight on this creative version:

Summary

This version of The Three Little Pigs is a fractured fairy tale.  It starts with the familiar “Once upon a time” and the first pig building his house out of straw.   But, when the wolf huffs and puffs, he blows the first pig out of the story.  The words of the familiar fairy tale continue, but the wolf knows this story is not going the way it should.  The first pig gets the second and third pigs to join him outside the story.  They escape on a paper airplane made from pages of their fairy tale.  They make their way through a familiar rhyme, “Hey Diddle Diddle,” and pick up the cat and the fiddle.   Then, they rescue a dragon from another fairy tale.  After seeing one of the pages from their book, the three pigs go “home” and take their new friends with them.  The dragon scares the wolf away…and the dragon, the cat and the three pigs all lived happily ever after!


Discussion

The pigs are in charge in this reimagined version of the classic fairy tale.  At first glance, the familiar pieces are in place.  But by the third page, the story is setting off on a new path.  Children will enjoy the creativity of this book.  The page layout with the fairy tale pages and the animals moving around outside of those pages will maintain their attention.  Parents and grandparents will have fun moving between reading the traditional text and the talking bubbles.  

Distinctions are made between the traditional fairy tale pages and the fractured version.  The text from the traditional fairy tale is displayed in one font, while the text in the talking bubbles is written in another.  The rhyme and additional fairy tale featured in the fractured version also make use of alternative fonts for their text. 

A unique point playing with font occurs towards the end of the story when the dragon makes his way into the traditional fairy tale.  His head and horns seem to knock down the text on the page and scatter the letters from the traditional version.  Wiesner takes the fractured fairy tale literally and fractures the words at the end of the story!  A few pages feature letters jumbling in the air and landing on the ground.  The second little pig can be seen trying to gather the falling letters.  The end of the book shows the letters in the final words teeter-tottering along a straight line, with the second little pig putting the letters back together in the words.  He has the letter e and letter r from the word “after” in his hand to complete the traditional ending “And they all lived happily ever after.”  

There is variety in the style of illustrations, too.  The traditional fairy tale is drawn with solid outlines filled in with color and sharp detail.  The fractured fairy tale makes the animals look more life-like.  The details of the pigs pop against the white background in the middle of the book.  Shadows and light are used to enhance the illustrations of the pigs throughout the fractured version.  On the pages featuring the rhyme, solid, bright colors are used.  On the pages featuring the additional fairy tale, illustrations are outlined in black and white.
The most interesting illustrations include a hybrid of styles used when the animals are shown halfway in a page and halfway out.  These occur when the pigs make their escape from the traditional fairy tale and when the pigs, cat and dragon make their way in and out of each story.

Throughout the book, the illustration boundaries change.  Some are limited to one page and others work across two pages.  The illustrations of the pigs taking flight on their paper airplane against the white background in the middle of the book are unlike any other two page scenes.


Overall, the strength of this book is in the way the familiar story takes an unfamiliar twist and the distinctions made between the traditional fairy tale and the fractured version. 

Awards/Reviews

David Wiesner has won the Caldecott Medal three times.  The Three Little Pigs was a Caldecott Medal winner in 2002.  

Here are samples of a few starred reviews: 

“Wiesner has created a funny, wildly imaginative tale that encourages readers 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.” - Booklist, ALA

"Children will delight in the changing perspectives...and the whole notion of the interrupted narrative...fresh and funny...Witty dialogue and physical comedy abound in this inspired retelling of a familiar favorite.” - School Library Journal

“As readers have come to expect from the inventive works of Wiesner, nothing is ever quite as it seems in his picture books. This version of the pigs' tale starts off traditionally enough —warm, inviting watercolor panels show in succession the tiny houses, their owner-builders and their toothy visitor. But when the wolf begins to huff and puff, he blows the pigs right out of the illustrations. Though Wiesner briefly touched on this theme in his Free Fall (fans may note a strong resemblance between the dragon in that volume and the one featured in these pages), he takes the idea of 3-D characters operating independently of their storybooks to a new level here. The three pigs land in the margins, which open out onto a postmodern landscape hung with reams of pages made for climbing on, crawling under and folding up for paper airplane travel. Together the pigs visit a book of nursery rhymes and save the aforementioned dragon from death at the hands of the knight. When they get the dragon home, he returns their kindness by scaring the wolf off permanently.
Even the book's younger readers will understand the distinctive visual code. As the pigs enter the confines of a storybook page, they conform to that book's illustrative style, appearing as nursery-rhyme friezes or comic-book line drawings. When the pigs emerge from the storybook pages into the meta-landscape they appear photographically clear and crisp, with shadows and three dimensions. Wiesner's (Tuesday) brilliant use of white space and perspective (as the pigs fly to the upper right-hand corner of a spread on their makeshift plane, or as one pig's snout dominates a full page) evokes a feeling that the characters can navigate endless possibilities —and that the range of story itself is limitless.” - Publishers Weekly

“With this inventive retelling, Caldecott Medalist Wiesner (Tuesday, 1991) plays with literary conventions in a manner not seen since Scieszka's The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales (1993). The story begins with a traditional approach in both language and illustrations, but when the wolf huffs and puffs, he not only blows down the pigs' wood and straw houses, but also blows the pigs right out of the story and into a parallel story structure. The three pigs (illustrated in their new world in a more three-dimensional style and with speech balloons) take off on a postmodern adventure via a paper airplane folded from the discarded pages of the traditional tale. They sail through several spreads of white space and crash-land in a surreal world of picture-book pages, where they befriend the cat from "Hey Diddle Diddle" and a charming dragon that needs to escape with his cherished golden rose from a pursuing prince. The pigs, car and dragon pick up the pages of the original story and return to that flat, conventional world, concluding with a satisfying bowl of dragon-breath-broiled soup in their safe, sturdy brick house. The pigs have braved the new world and returned with their treasure: the cat for company and fiddle music, the dragon's golden rose for beauty, and the dragon himself for warmth and protection from the wolf, who is glimpsed through the window, sitting powerlessly in the distance. On the last few pages, the final words of the text break apart, sending letters drifting down into the illustrations to show us that once we have ventured out into the wider world, out stories never stay the same.” - Kirkus Reviews

“David Wiesner's postmodern interpretation of this tale plays imaginatively with traditional picture book and story conventions and with readers' expectations of both. . . .Wiesner explores the possibility of different realities within a book's pages. . . . 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.” - Horn Book

“Artwork explodes off the page and the layout pushes bookmaking convention as the porcine siblings and their pals explore new literary territory.” - SLJ Best Books of the Year

Teacher’s Tools

This book could be used to compare to other versions of The Three Little Pigs.  A double bubble map could be used to compare and contrast different versions of this traditional tale. 

Students could also study perspective between this book with the pigs guiding the storytelling and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka, with the wolf telling the story. 

The genre of “fractured fairy tales” could be studied using this book as well as books like The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and The Stinky Cheese Man, both of which are by Jon Scieszka.  Students could work as a whole class or in small groups to try their hand at creating a fractured fairy tale using the foundation of a familiar fairy tale as their guide.

Bibliographic Information

Wiesner, David. 2001. The Three Little Pigs. New York: Clarion Books. ISBN 0-618-00701-6.