BIBLIOGRAPHY
Scieszka, John. 1989. The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs. Ill. by Lane Smith. New York, NY: Viking. ISBN 978-0140544510
PLOT SUMMARY
In this hilarious tale, the traditional story of “The 3 Little Pigs” is retold from the vantage point of the Big Bad Wolf, who, in this version, is neither big, nor bad. Alexander T. Wolf is a victim of the press. From his jail cell, he recounts what truly happened. Al, as he likes to be called, was making a birthday for his dear grandmother who, from the photograph that can be seen of her, was probably sick in bed. He, himself, was ailing, suffering from an awful cold. As he was concocting the cake, he realized that he had completely run out of sugar.
He walked to his neighbor’s house to ask if he could borrow a cup. His closest neighbor turned out to be one of the 3 little pigs. Al approached the straw house and tried to knock and call inside, but the pig pretended not to be home. As Alexander tried to leave, he was caught up in a terrible sneezing fit, and accidentally sneezed the pig’s house down. The pig was killed in the act and, not wanting to let good meat go to waste, Al devoured the corpse. Al proceeded to the next house, this one made of sticks that belonged to the first pig’s brother. He knocked and was told that the pig was busy and could not be bothered. Al was going to leave, when he sneezed again, inadvertently blowing down the second pig’s house. This pig, too, was killed by falling debris. Al, not wanting to waste food, devoured this corpse as well. However, he still did not have his cup of sugar. He approached the third pig’s house, the brother of the previous pigs. This house was made of brick, so when Al suffered a sneezing fit it did not blow down. He asked this pig for sugar and was told, very rudely, to go away. The pig then proceeded to insult Al’s poor, old grandmother.
At this point in the story, Al admits that he lost his composure, as would any decent person whose dear relative had been insulted, and began beating on the pig’s door. All of the excitement aggravated his cold, causing him to huff, and puff and sneeze and wheeze. When the police arrived, he seemed like a crazed neighbor on a rampage. When the story hit the press, the reporters found the tale of an ill wolf trying to make a cake for a sick grandmother boring and embellished the tale into the familiar one that we all know.
Alexander T. Wolf was framed.
CRITICAL ANALYSIS:
In this story, we, the readers, are about to hear the tale of an injustice done to a wrongly convicted felon, but should we take this wolf seriously? The character voice of Alexander T. Wolf is intelligent, witty, and slightly mocking in areas. His conversational tone draws readers in and holds their attention. The artwork belies the dark humor infused within this piece that can be enjoyed by children and adults.
Scieszka starts off with Alexander, who likes to be called Al, preparing us for a very atypical variant of the Three Little Pigs. He alerts us that there is a side of the story that we have never heard, and a more ignorant reader who was not read a summary or been allowed to see the cover of the book, might wonder whose side of the story we are about to hear. On the next page, we are treated to a close up of Al, the wolf, and he is wearing spectacles. This is a clever ploy by the wolf and the author, for it is assumed that people usually attribute these personality traits with those who wear glasses: intelligent, passive aggressive, wimpy. The colors used are dark, but Al is telling his story from his jail cell. We are meant to feel depressed, for he is.
Al introduces a wolf’s standard diet to us. It is not his fault he is a carnivore and the creatures he eats are what some of us think are cute. He indirectly says that we eat many of the same things and no one puts us on trial. He has become personable and relatable to us, and now can begin the case that he probably wished he could have presented in court to a more suitable audience.
Al recounts in the first pages how he was trying to bake a cake for his poor, grandmother. The kitchen is a mess, Alexander is wearing a tweed suit with a bow-tie and his glasses are askew. As he is trying to measure ingredients, the thermometer under his tongue slips; he has a bad cold. The author creates sympathy for this sick wolf by portraying him as someone who might be viewed as a “nerd” in contemporary settings, very unthreatening. However, if one peers further into the picture, the bowl in which the ingredients are being mixed contains a rabbit and rotten eggs and the photograph of granny looks mighty familiar. Is that the wolf that devoured Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother? It can be assumed that perhaps Al’s grandmother is ill and she had to take photograph in bed, but I have a feeling the author is too clever to let that be the only case.
When Al realizes he is out of sugar, he decides to borrow a cup from the neighbors, just like in an old fashioned television program that portrays images of wholesome families and neighborhoods. He walks from his house to the straw house belonging to the first pig. One must notice how much darker the colors are on the wolf’s side of the neighborhood as he ventures into the more brightly colored side of neighborhood where the pigs live. The wolf interrupts his tale, adding humorous interjections about how ridiculous it is for this pig to have built his house from straw, which should result in the reader forming a lower opinion about this pig due to his lack of intelligence.
The house was flimsy from the start. Al does knock, but there is no answer. He is going to leave, but instead of the traditional “huffing” and “puffing”, he “huffed” and “snuffed” and “sneezed a great sneeze.” This phrase replacing the traditional repetition of “huffed and puffed and blew the house down.” The first pig is home after all, and is killed in the accident. What a rude pig for ignoring his neighbor. The corpse lies in the debris, and Al, being a wolf views this as carrion, comparing to if we had found something we liked to eat lying around. Should it be left to waste? Al strokes his chin, trying to decide, as he does so, we can now see the gray and white in his fur. He is not only wearing a tweed suit with a bowtie and glasses and has a cold, but he may be elderly. Al decides not to waste meat and eats the pig, but he still does not have his cup of sugar. He proceeds to the next house, which ends up belonging to the first pig’s brother.
This pig’s house is made of sticks, and the author allows us to see how careless and sloppy the pig was in cutting down the trees in his own front yard to build his home with. He’s left the raw tree stumps and his saw out for the public see. When Al knocks on the door, the pig inside gives a rude reply and looks like a slob from the mere glimpse we see of him. Scieszka does an excellent job of literally painting the pigs in a bad light to make Al seem more of the hero, or rather antihero, of the story. Although, he is rudely treated, Al does not react and is preparing to leave, when he feels another sneeze coming on. The repetition is repeated. The audience can come to predict the saying and when reading it aloud, children can be encouraged to chant it with you.
The stick house falls and the second pig is dead—“as a doornail.” He offers his “Wolf’s honor”, but featured on this page is also a small picture of a gable. This could be interpreted to mean that perhaps, he was able to tell this story to the court and was not believed. Al devours the second corpse and is now so stuffed he can barely walk. The starting letter on the next page is formed by plump, link sausages, perhaps trying to help the audience associate the eating of the pig with humans eating sausage or hot dogs. The pig, to Al, is not a sentient being, but food, and as human beings, we do eat pork as well. He goes to the house of the third pig to ask for a cup of sugar. This house is made of brick. The pig inside has a very ominous, almost sinister look to him. His eyes are red and his face is cloaked in shadow. Al now has out his handkerchief wiping his nose as he has to look up to meet the pig’s eyes. He looks small and insignificant. The pig goes on to insult Al and his grandmother, and here Al admits that he lost his temper. In his fit of temperament, he tries to break down the pig’s door, all the while sneezing up a storm. The police, who are all pigs, arrive on the scene with clubs and reporters, who are also pigs, arrive with microphones and notepads to a nightmarish-looking scene. The profile of one of the police pigs can be seen, and he has sharp teeth and fangs, like a wolf, which might lead an audience to wonder just who were the real predators there?
We are told a believable story of how the press decided to embellish the tale to make it more interesting, conceiving the traditional story that the audience Al is talking to is familiar with. Who would not believe that a reporter would choose an alternate angle to make a story more likely to sell? The last scene we are given is of a very old Al, since he begins his tale with the traditional “once upon a time” we can infer that he has been in jail for a very long time, extending a tin cup from his prison cell, still wanting sugar for his grandmother. The warden beside the locked door is a sour-faced pig.
Using Al’s voice, Scieszka creates a successful unreliable narrator that the audience will want to believe. He transforms Al into a sympathetic character and plays the part of a criminal lawyer trying to redeem his client who was given an unfair trial. It is obvious that Al’s trial was probably lost before it began due to not having a jury of peers and public slander. The dark oil paints and sometimes hazy imagery used during Al’s story-telling, helps us to remember that the story being told is a recollection, a memory of something that happened long ago and may not be entirely accurate. After all, reporters are not the only people who know how to embellish.
Without vocal inflections or facial expressions, the tone of this work can be easily conveyed to listeners just by the witty, tongue-in-cheek turns of phrase Scieszka uses to flesh out the character of Alexander T. Wolf. The purpose of this book is clearly to entertain and to teach and remind younger readers, and perhaps older readers alike, that there are always two sides to every story.
REVIEW EXCERPTS(S):
"Designed with uncommon flair," said PW, this "gaily newfangled version of the classic tale" takes sides with the villain. "Imaginative watercolors eschew realism, further updating the tale." A Spanish-language reprint will be issued simultaneously ($4.99, -055758-X). Ages 3-8. –Publishers Weekly
Grade 1 Up--Victim for centuries of a bad press, Alexander ("You can call me Al") T. Wolf steps forward at last to give his side of the story. Trying to borrow a cup of sugar to make a cake for his dear old Granny, Al calls on his neighbors--and can he help it if two of them built such shoddy houses? A couple of sneezes, a couple of dead pigs amidst the wreckage and, well, it would be shame to let those ham dinners spoil, wouldn't it? And when the pig in the brick house makes a nasty comment about Granny, isn't it only natural to get a little steamed? It's those reporters from the Daily Pig that made Al out to be Big and Bad, that caused him to be arrested and sent to the (wait for it) Pig Pen. "I was framed," he concludes mournfully. Smith's dark tones and sometimes shadowy, indistinct shapes recall the distinctive illustrations he did for Merriam's Halloween ABC (Macmillan, 1987); the bespectacled wolf moves with a rather sinister bonelessness, and his juicy sneezes tear like thunderbolts through a dim, grainy world. It's the type of book that older kids (and adults) will find very funny. -John Peters, New York Public Library, SLJ
Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (1989) turned the favorite porkers' story upside-down by allowing the grossly misjudged wolf to tell his side of the story. Wiesner's latest is a post-modern fantasy for young readers that takes Scieszka's fragmentation a step further: it not only breaks apart and deliciously reinvents the pigs' tale, it invites readers to step beyond the boundaries of story and picture book altogether.
The book begins predictably: the three pigs set out to seek their fortune, and when the first pig builds a house of straw, the wolf blows it down. Here's when the surprises start. The wolf blows the pig right out of the picture and out of the story itself. In the following frames, the story continues as expected: the wolf eats the pig and moves on to the other houses. But the pictures no longer match up. Frames show the bewildered wolf searching hungrily through the rubble as first one, then all the pigs escape the illustrations and caper out into open space with the loose pages of the wolf's tale swirling around them. After fashioning a paper airplane from a passing page, the emancipated pigs soar off on a sort of space flight through blank white spreads, ultimately discovering other picture-book "planets" along the way. Finally, the pigs wander through a near-city of illustrated pages, each suggesting its own story. Joined by the nursery rhyme Cat and Fiddle and a fairy-tale dragon, the pigs find and reassemble the pages to their own story and reenter to find the wolf still at the door. In the end, the story breaks down altogether, as the wolf flees, the text breaks apart, letters spill into a waiting basket, and the animals settle down to a bowl of . . . alphabet soup instead of wolf stew.
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. Carolyn Phelan, Booklist
CONNECTIONS:
Other variants of the traditional tale of “The 3 Little Pigs” can be shared with children to help them further compare and contrast plots of stories and recognize common thematic elements are:
Trivizas, Eugene. 1997. The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig. Ill. by Helen Oxenbury. New York, NY: McElderry. ISBN 978-0689815287
Moser, Barry. 2001. The Three Little Pigs. New York, NY: Little, Brown Young Readers. ISBN 978-0316585446
Kellogg, Steven. 2002. The Three Little Pigs. New York, NY: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0064437790
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