The Three Pigs

Starred review from February 26, 2001
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 a knight. When they get the dragon home, he returns their kindness by scaring the wolf off permanently.

Starred review from April 1, 2001
K-Gr 6-In Tuesday (Clarion, 1991), Wiesner demonstrated that pigs could fly. Here, he shows what happens when they take control of their story. In an L. Leslie Brooke sort of style (the illustrations are created through a combination of watercolor, gouache, colored inks, and pencils), the wolf comes a-knocking on the straw house. When he puffs, the pig gets blown "right out of the story." (The double spread contains four panels on a white background; the first two follow the familiar story line, but the pig falls out of the third frame, so in the fourth, the wolf looks quite perplexed.) So it goes until the pigs bump the story panels aside, fold one with the wolf on it into a paper airplane, and take to the air. Children will delight in the changing perspectives, the effect of the wolf's folded-paper body, and the whole notion of the interrupted narrative. Wiesner's luxurious use of white space with the textured pigs zooming in and out of view is fresh and funny. They wander through other stories-their bodies changing to take on the new style of illustration as they enter the pages-emerging with a dragon and the cat with a fiddle. The cat draws their attention to a panel with a brick house, and they all sit down to soup, while one of the pigs reconstructs the text. Witty dialogue and physical comedy abound in this inspired retelling of a familiar favorite.-Wendy Lukehart, Dauphin County Library, Harrisburg, PA

Copyright 2001 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2001
\deflang1033\pard\plain\f3\fs24 Ages 6-9. Jon Scieszka's \plain\f3\fs24" The True Story of the Three Little Pigs \plain\f3\fs24 (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. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2001
In this postmodern interpretation, the style of the artwork shifts back and forth a few times, as Wiesner explores different realities within a book's pages. The story begins by following the familiar pattern, but the art and dialogue balloons tell another tale: the pigs actually step out of the panel illustrations "without" being eaten and the perplexed wolf remains behind. There's a lot going on here, but once you get your bearings, this is a fantastic journey told with a light touch.

(Copyright 2001 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)