The Three Pigs
by David Wiesner
Summary
Three pigs build their houses exactly as the old story says, and the wolf blows down the straw house and the stick house exactly as expected, until the force of his huff sends the first pig tumbling clean out of the picture's frame and onto the blank page beside it. From there David Wiesner lets his pigs do what no picture book pig had done before: they step fully outside their own story, fold its pages into a paper airplane, and fly off into other tales altogether, rescuing a dragon from a knight's story who becomes their new traveling companion, meeting the cat and the fiddle from a nursery rhyme spread rendered in flat, formal watercolor, and wandering panel by panel through art that keeps switching styles to match whichever story the pigs have just wandered into. Once they have collected their new friends, the pigs fold their own story back into shape and return to it on their own terms, complete with a dragon and a fiddling cat who were never part of the original tale, and close the book with the wolf outmatched by a cast far stranger than the one he expected to find.
Wiesner tells almost all of this without narration, so a reader has to watch the pigs' expressions and the shifting art styles to follow what is happening, which makes the book as much a puzzle to solve as a story to hear read aloud. It suits children old enough to notice a joke about how stories are put together, four and up, and it rewards a slow read where an adult and child can stop on a page and talk about what just happened to the panel borders.
Historical Context & Significance
The American Library Association gave David Wiesner the 2002 Caldecott Medal for The Three Pigs over three honor books: The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, illustrated by Brian Selznick, Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., illustrated by Bryan Collier, and The Stray Dog by Marc Simont. It was Wiesner's second Caldecott Medal, after Tuesday in 1992, and he would win a third for Flotsam five years later, in 2007.
Disney optioned the book for an animated feature in May 2002 and announced a hybrid two dimensional and three dimensional film in December 2003, but the project was never completed. The book has stayed in print continuously since, still cited as one of the clearest examples of a picture book using its own physical form, the page, the panel, the fold, as part of the story rather than only as a container for it.