What do you get when the three pigs escape their story and take an adventure into others? A silly adventure full of fun, friends, and mischief. See what these three pigs get into as they venture beyond their pages.
This fun and fresh retelling jumps right off the pages. The pigs start out illustrated in a traditional style as their story begins. soon, the pigs escape their pages and become more realistic. They interact with the panels on the pages, knocking them over, folding them into a paper plane (the page with the wolf of course) giving the text fun and interactive feel. The dialogue is minimal except for a few speech bubbles moving the story along until they come across their first story.
As they move from one story to another, characters begin to join them giving a fun sense of companionship. As they return to their story they are able to change their ending in to one that is much happier for all.
"With this inventive retelling, Caldecott Medalist Wiesner (Tuesday, 1991) plays with literary conventions...
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, cat, and dragon pick up the pages of the original story and return to that flat, conventional world...
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, our stories never stay the same." -Kirkus Review
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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." -Gillian Engberg, Booklist Review
Book Activities:
Students could write about the pigs joining a tale not mentioned in the book. Students could also read other retellings of this story and compare the elements, one has been recommended below.
Book Information:
Wiesner, D. (2001). THE THREE PIGS. New York: Clarion Books. IBSN 0618007016
What next?
If you are looking for another fun retelling of this story, check out The True Story of The Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka.
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