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The Three Pigs

Image from goodreads.com

Wiesner’s postmodern picturebook is a metafictive reimagining of the classic fairytale which employs water color, gouache, colored inks, pencil, and colored pencil on Fabriano hot press paper to raucously depict the three little pigs in a cartoon style while they remain in their own story. However, in the course of eluding the big bad wolf’s attacks they manage to not only survive but also break the frames of their own story, explore its gutters, and break into the frames that encase the stories of other fables. As the pigs tromp from tale to tale they collect new friends and find themselves rendered in varying styles of illustration running the gamut from highly representational to nigh realistic; moreover, they are quite photorealistic in their existence in the gutters outside the frames, in “the real world.” Suddenly remembering the truth of Dorothy Gale’s words, they decide to return home and—much to the dismay of the big bad wolf—take their new friends with them. Although young children will adore the pigs’ violations of the implicit rules of storytelling, Wiesner’s wit is ideal for introducing irony to high school students. This text couples beautifully with the concepts of Saturnalia and the inversion of social mores such as the donkey’s eulogy in Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

  • The Three Pigs by David Wiesner; illus. by the author
  • Intermediate
  • Clarion Books
  • 40 pp.
  • Published 2001
  • ISBN 978-0-618-00701-1
  • $16.00
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