Title: The Three Pigs
Author: David Wiesner
Genre: Animal / Drama / Humor / Fantasy
Year Published: 2001
Year Read: 2008
Publisher: Clarion Books
Source: Library
Content Rating: Ages 5+ (Nothing Objectionable)
Buy on: Amazon // Book Depository
“The Three Pigs” is a children’s book written by David Wiesner, author of the famous book “Tuesday.” “The Three Pigs” is about how the three pigs basically come out of the story and their adventures in the real world. This book is the winner of the Caldecott Medal and is surely to send kids rolling over with laughter.
David Wiesner’s writing is smart and creative, but it is his illustrations that take center stage here. At first, the three pigs are drawn in regular two-dimensional storybook characters, but when the first pig gets blown out of the story, he is suddenly a three-dimensional and realistic looking character indicating that the pig has broken the line between fantasy, which is the story he was in and reality, where he is blown out of the page. This goes on throughout most of the book where the cat playing the fiddle and the dragon turn three-dimensional also when they came out of their stories until the end of the book where all the characters are two-dimensional again when they come back to the three pigs’ story. My favorite image in this book would have to be when the first pig is looking straight at the audience and exclaims:
“I think… someone’s out there.”
And you could see his face close up and he is squinting at the audience to see who is out there which indicates that he knows that the audience is watching, which is something that most illustrated characters do not notice while they are in a story. David Wiesner’s writing is creative, especially when the book starts out with the story of the three pigs and then once the first pig is blown out of the page, the writing takes form of a comic book as the characters are speaking through the bubbles you would normally see in comic books.
“The Three Pigs” is a wonderfully surreal story from the creative mind of David Wiesner and is certainly a story that will stand out from the rest of the fractured fairy tales other than “The Stinky Cheese Man.” I would recommend this book for children ages five and up since children younger than five would not understand the complicated plot.
