willbradbury's Full Review: David Wiesner - The Three Pigs
Looking at the cover of David Wiesner's The Three Pigs, I find myself struck by how wonderfully goofy is the face of a pig, this cabbage leaf-eared, rodeo clown-lipped creature, with a beezer blunt as a child's first sexual queries. And even though the skin around them is pouched, their eyes possess a lively warmth, almost human. Gazing into these six eyeballs, and they peeking back into my own, something else occurs to me: am I the voyeur, or are they?
Mister Wiesner's book-which has thirty-seven pages, has the dimensions of a handspan and-a-quarter up, and a handspan and-a-half across, and costs sixteen billies-is an ideal coffee table book. I say this because it is a brief-enough curio for callers to flip through while you're in the kitchen frosting the cupcakes, or mixing the iced tea, and will no doubt put them in an absolutely hummy mood by the time you return, if they're not in one already.
This is the first book that I have ever read of Wiesner's, and my first impression of him is that his writing has the same scampish playfulness as William Steig's Shrek, or Tom Hulce's Mozart, with his braying guffaw, under-sized maturity, and overbig brain. I sort of imagine him as probably being that too-precocious-for-his-own-good half-pint in Sunday School whose mind was simply crawling with questions, who needled the teacher to no end asking things like," Could God make a boulder so big that even he couldn't lift it?" After a fashion, you could call Wiesner the Spielberg of children's books, as Spielberg has always had that naifish, questioning mind, and the abysmal creative resources to put his questions to the brains of a mass audience, and so can Wiesner.
Wiesner, according to the jacket flap, "is the author/artist of Tuesday, a Caldecott Medal winner; Free Fall andSector 7, both Caldecott Honor winners; June 29, 1999; and Hurricane. He is also the illustrator of Eve Bunting's Night of the Gargoyles. Ever since the pigs took to the air at the end of Tuesday, he has wanted to give them a book of their own. Mr. Wiesner lives with his family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin."
His book opens rather traditionally, with the wolf (whose eyes are an appropriate sulfur) dropping round on his new neighbor, one of the pigs, who is just getting settled in his thatched, kitschy-retro abode. Now I'm assuming that everybody is up to speed on this timeless tale, so I'll cut all of that "huffing and puffing", and "chinny-chin-chin" stuff and get straight to the point where Mr. Wiesner's version of the more than eighty-six tellings of "The Three Pigs" parts company with the other, somewhat more vanilla variations, and follows its own gonzo drummer.
You see, the wolf's blusterous breath has an unanticipated effect on this little piglet: It blows him clean out of the story! What does that mean? It means that our porky protagonist, and soon after, his brethren, are liberated not only out of two-dimensionalness, but out of their fairy-tale reality altogether. In what has to be one of the most brassy, philosophical images I have ever seen, one of the pigs, after stepping out into white space, turns back around and crumples up the page!
The characters have beforehand been depicted with flat, bloodless exactitude, but now are given curves and corners. It's a funny thing, really. Whenever a Loonie Tune character was pancaked, he was two-dimensional-looking to begin with. He somehow went from being two-dimensional, to being even further two-dimensional, if that's possible. However, when the pigs step away from their wooden, white bread universe, there is an effect that they have become genuinely robust, filled-out, richer, even though they still are merely two-dimensional. This is profoundly illustrated when the pigs turn a page into a paper airplane and ride it away from the reader, their rumps like tan and toast Sno-balls with Jerry curls.
One of the bits of brilliant contrast that Wiesner sets up is that when the characters in the story deviate from the text, the text keeps right on going as if nothing had happened. The difference between a fairy tale and something with its own consciousness is that the fairy tale can never be anything but a fairy tale. It's locked-in, exactly the same from start to finish every single time, having all the spontaneity of a game show host interview.
But the pigs, once free, are capable of going anywhere they fancy, even into other fairy tales. They go into the "hey-diddle-diddle" nursery rhyme and the "cat with its fiddle" joins their little clique, as does a dragon, a snaky-bodied, rather amiable worm, with a tesselated pizza slice mug. We get the contrast of different perspectives, as each story is illustrated in a different fashion: "hey-diddle-diddle" in the tackily-brilliant hues of 747 emergency instructions, and the dragon occupies a Gothic cartoon microcosm. Each of these places are hung up like pictures in a dark room, and the dragon actually lifts one up and appraises it, as though it were a panel he would like to purchase.
One page, for some singular reason, is both sides blank. This comes right in the middle of the story, just after the pigs have gone whooshing off in their paper airplane. Why is this? There is not even a speck that is the porkers in the distance. Most people will just count the page a bungle and flip on, to where the piggies return, but I do earnestly believe that that page has a purpose. Think about this, we have just seen them egress one world, and enter a more lush, persnickety world. At least I have. You still have to buy the book. Anyway, I think maybe Wiesner hopes his readers are so caught up in his little roundelay, that after his characters sail off the page, that maybe, just maybe, we'll look up from the book to see if they have gone skying off into our reality.
As with all literature of this sort, the gadzooks is in the detail. In one scene, the pig who cobbles up his house from bricks is shown half-in and half-out of a fairy-tale, so that flanks and hindquarters are still black and grey. It looks as though he took a headlong dive at the page, slammed through, but got stuck halfway. In the corner of another page, one of those alphabet strips they hang in classrooms ribbons through, the ones with a letter and corresponding picture of some creature or object's moniker which has an identical first letter. The second-to-last page shows one of the pigs plucking down the letters of the text like fresh Macintoshes. And instead of the customary yet unfactual corkscrew tail, each of the pigs have a shaggy whip.
One thing admirable about this book is that it isn't merely a novelty, but actually raises pertinent, penetrating questions about human perception. Such as: Is it really such a silly notion that I could go to cross a street and a mach truck plow into me and !!pow! me right out of this reality and onto a blank, white page, and I can just fold up this reality like a Rand Mc Nally road atlas and stick it in my back pocket? In other words, that what we perceive as reality is really something papery and collapsible.
One of my primary beefs with the Tao is that it's all text, the Bible, too. Not to mention the Kohran and all of that other sacred literature. Philosophy operates best when it's illustrated, when it gives us something concrete to focus on. A picture is a philosophical utterance, something eloquent. I've found more to give me revelational pause in a Popeye still than in the entire religious canon. Wiesner gives us numerous silver-tongued images.
On one of the pages we see a series of panels. The first is of a mammoth breaker lobbing dozens of fish through the air. In the next panel the same fish are swimming through a forest. In the third panel, the fish are gliding by an apartment flat. And a fourth panel shows a little boy watching the fish from his bedroom window. Behind these panels are still more panels, of Jack and the Beanstalk and an Arthurian castle and Chicken Little. And behind these even more panels. It reminds me of the scenes in Monster's Inc., where we see millions of closet doors, each leading to a different child's bedroom. And I feel that a profound statement is made on that page, because it seems that Wiesner is equating childhood dreams with fairy tales, that they are one in the same. Which makes sense enough. In a dream there is no defining, granitic logic, and there is lurking terror, yet we feel completely at ease. The same could be said of a fairy tale.
I like the last image the best. The grandest promise of the fairy tale is that, contrariwise to what experience tells us, we can go home. The pigs, despite all they've seen, decide to go back to their beige, starchy origins because it's home. And never mind that their domicile seems to have the same deceiving dimensions as Snoopy's dog house (which, while being one-storied, basementless, and atticless, still had a fifty-person capacity, a wet bar, and a rumpus room), looking like a cookie tin with a rose window on the outside, but able to comfortably fit a dragon, a trio of pot-gutted pigs, and a pus#y cat on the inside, home's home.
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