Three Little Pigs (film)

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For other uses, see Three Little Pigs (disambiguation).
Three Little Pigs

Silly Symphonies series

Practical Pig, Fiddler Pig and Fifer Pig sing "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?"
Directed by Burt Gillett
Produced by Walt Disney
Story by Boris V. Morkovin
Voices by Pinto Colvig
Billy Bletcher
Mary Moder
Dorothy Compton
Music by Carl W. Stalling
Animation by Art Babbitt
Distributed by United Artists
Release date(s) May 27, 1933
Color process Technicolor
Running time 8 minutes
IMDb profile

Three Little Pigs is an animated short film released on May 27, 1933 by United Artists, produced by Walt Disney and directed by Burt Gillett. Based on a fairy tale of the same name, Three Little Pigs won the 1934 Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons. In 1994, it was voted #11 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field. In 2007, Three Little Pigs was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Contents

[edit] Plot

Practical Pig, Fiddler Pig and Fifer Pig are three brothers who build their own houses with bricks, sticks and straw respectively. All three of them play a different kind of musical instrument – Fifer Pig plays the flute, Fiddler Pig plays the fiddle and Practical Pig plays the piano. Fifer and Fiddler build their houses with much ease and have fun all day. Practical, on the other hand, works all day long to build his strong brick house, but his two brothers poke fun at him. An angry Practical warns them that if they don't build a better house, the Big Bad Wolf will threaten their lives. Fifer and Fiddler ignore him and continue to play, singing the now famous song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?".

One day, the Big Bad Wolf really comes by, and blows Fifer and Fiddler's houses down. The two pigs manage to escape from the hungry Wolf and hide at Practical's house. Unable to blow down the strong brick house, the Wolf disguises himself twice as an innocent sheep (that was at Fiddler's stick house) and a Fuller Brush man (a Jewish peddler in the uncensored version) to trick the pigs into letting him in, but fails. Finally, he attempts to enter the house through the chimney, but smart Practical Pig takes off the lid of a boiling pot filled with water under the chimney, and the Wolf falls right into it. Shrieking in pain, the Wolf runs away frantically, while the pigs sing "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" again.

[edit] Voice cast

[edit] Reaction and legacy

The movie was phenomenally successful with audiences of the day, so much that theaters ran the cartoon for months after its debut and grossed a lot of money too [1]. A number of theaters added hand-drawn "beards" to the movie posters for the cartoon as a way of indicating how long its theatrical run lasted. The cartoon is still considered to be the most successful animated short ever made [2]], and remained on top of animation until Disney was able to boast Mickey's popularity further by making him a top merchandise icon by the end of 1934[3].

Animator Chuck Jones said, "That was the first time that anybody ever brought characters to life [in an animated cartoon]". (Other animation historians, particularly admirers of Winsor McCay, would dispute the word "first," but Jones was not referring to personality as such but to characterization through posture and movement.) Fifer and Fiddler Pig are frivolous and care-free; Practical Pig is cautious and earnest.

The moderate, but not blockbuster, success of the further "Three Pigs" cartoons was seen as a factor in Walt Disney's decision not to rest on his laurels, but instead to continue to move forward with risk-taking projects, such as the multiplane camera and the first feature-length animated movie. Disney's slogan, often repeated over the years, was "you can't top pigs with pigs."

The original song composed by Frank Churchill for the cartoon, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", was a best-selling single, mirroring the people's resolve against the "big bad wolf" of The Great Depression; the song actually became something of an anthem of the Great Depression [4]. When the Nazis began expanding the boundaries of Germany in the years preceding World War II, the song was used to represent the complacency of the Western world in allowing Hitler to make considerable acquisitions of territory without going to war, and was notably used in Disney animations for the Canadian war effort.

Two cartoons inspired by this cartoon were produced by Warner Bros., The first was "Pigs in a Polka" which tells the story to the accompaniment of Johannes Brahms' Hungarian Dances. The other was "The Three Little Bops", featuring the pigs as a jazz band, who refused to let the inept trumpet-playing wolf join until after he died and went to Hell, whereupon his playing markedly improved. Both of these cartoons were directed by ex-Disney animator Friz Freleng.

The pigs and the Big Bad Wolf also appear at the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts as meetable characters.

The Three Little Pigs were featured in House of Mouse, and the Big Bad Wolf was one of the villains in Mickey's House of Villains. Practical Pig was featured in Mickey's Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse.

The Three Little Pigs and Zeke the Wolf appeared in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

A poster in the queue area for the Magic Kingdom attraction Mickey's PhilharMagic features the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf as The Wolf Gang Trio.

[edit] Censorship

One sequence in the cartoon, which showed the Big Bad Wolf dressing up as a caricature of a Jewish peddler, was excised from the film after its release and replaced with a less offensive sequence, with the Wolf pretending to be the Fuller Brush man instead, but still had a Yiddish voice.

[edit] Home Video

In the United States, the short was first released on VHS, Betamax and Laserdisc in 1984 as part of its "Cartoon Classics" Home Video series. The topical 'Fuller Brush Man' line was changed to the incongruous "I'm the Fuller Brush Man - I'm working my way though college" for this and all subsequent home video releases. It made its DVD debut on December 4, 2001, included in the Silly Symphonies set of the Walt Disney Treasures line. It was later included in Walt Disney's Timeless Tales, Vol. 1, released August 16, 2005, which also featured The Pied Piper (1933), The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934), The Tortoise and the Hare (1935) and The Prince and the Pauper (1990). In those other countries to whom the original 1933 cartoon was first released with original soundtracks in both English and other foreign languages, the uncensored images -with original 1933 soundtracks in both English and other foreign languages- are still issued by the Disney Corporation in home-release videos.

[edit] Sequels

Disney produced several sequels to Three Little Pigs, though none were nearly as successful as the original. The first of them was The Big Bad Wolf, also directed by Burt Gillett and first released on April 14, 1934. All four characters of the original film returned along with two new additions: Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, originating from a different folktale which also featured a wolf as the villain. The plot was fairly simple. Practical Pig is seen building an extension to the shared residence of the three pigs. The added space is presumably needed as the residence was originally intended for a single occupant. Meanwhile, Fiddler and Fifer Pig offer to escort the Red Riding Hood to her grandmother's residence. Against the advice of Practical, the trio attempts to follow a shortcut through the forest. They encounter the dressed-in-drag Wolf and barely evade capture. He proceeds in running ahead of them to the residence of the old woman. The Wolf places her in a closet and then awaits her granddaughter to arrive. The young girl soon does, but also enters the closet with the assistance of her grandmother. Then Fiddler and Fifer Pig alert their brother to the situation. Practical arrives and soon manages to send the Wolf running by placing hot coals and popcorn into his trousers. The short contained several gags but at the time failed to repeat the commercial success of the original. Modern audiences have found it entertaining enough but still inferior to its predecessor.

In 1936, a third cartoon starring the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf followed, with a theme more towards The Boy Who Cried Wolf. This short was entitled The Three Little Wolves and it was so called because it introduced the Big Bad Wolf's three cub sons, all of whom just as eager for a taste of the pigs as their father.

One more cartoon short featuring the characters, The Practical Pig, was released in 1939, right at the end of the Silly Symphonies' run.

In 1941, much of the film was edited into The Thrifty Pig, which was distributed by the National Film Board of Canada. Here, Practical Pig builds his house out of Canadian war bonds, and the Big Bad Wolf representing Nazi Germany is unable to blow his house down.

A new character, Lil Bad Wolf, the son of the Big Bad Wolf, was introduced in subsequent Disney comic books. He was a constant vexation to his father, the Big Bad Wolf, because the little son was not actually bad. His favorite playmates, in fact, were the Three Pigs.

There were subsequent sequels made for the Disney TV series Mickey Mouse Works as well.

[edit] External links

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