The Three Pigs

The Three Pigs

Retold and illustrated by David Wiesner

Publisher: Clarion Books

Copyright Date: 2001

# of Pages: 40

Genre: Folktale

            The cover drew me to the book by the expressions on the pigs’ faces. Not a lot of people know that pigs naturally have curved mouth that makes them look like they’re always smiling. Since I own a spoiled rotten pig, I chose this book to see what David Wiesner did to beef up the old folktale of the three little pigs. This is the folktale about three little pigs who each have their own houses while a wolf tries to come in and eat them.

            This book won a Caldecott for Wiesner’s illustrations. He uses gouache, water color, colored inks, pencil, and colored pencil on Fabriano hot press paper. How Wiesner makes this story his own is by using some graphic novel style speech bubbles along with having characters come out of the story and maneuver between scenes. When characters transition between the boxed scenes and out/around these scenes, you see a drastic shift in detail. The lines are very bold and the textures are smooth in parts and very detailed in rough in others –particularly through the transitions of characters in and out of scenes.

            This book would be appropriate for all school ages. You could use the pigs as classroom management tools, such that you could have laminated pigs with white thought bubbles connected to them that could be a parking place for thoughts and ideas. You could also use this in a comparison and contrasting exercise between other versions of the three little pigs stories.