Three Little Pigs (film)

Three Little Pigs is a 1933 Silly Symphony animated short film based on the classic fairy tale about a trio of pig brothers, who build their houses out of straw, sticks, and bricks to protect themselves from the Big Bad Wolf. The short won the 1934 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. 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".
==Plot==
Fifer Pig, Fiddler Pig and Practical 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 "toots his flute, doesn't give a hoot and plays around all day," Fiddler Pig "with a hey diddle diddle, plays on his fiddle and dances all kinds of jigs" and Practical Pig plays the piano. Fifer and Fiddler build their straw and stick houses with much ease and have fun all day. Practical, on the other hand, "has no chance to sing and dance for work and play don't mix," focusing on building his strong brick house, but his two brothers poke fun at him. An angry Practical warns them "You can play and laugh and fiddle. Don't think you can make me sore. I'll be safe and you'll be sorry when the Wolf comes through your door!" Fifer and Fiddler ignore him and continue to play, singing the now famous song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?".
As they are singing, the Big Bad Wolf really comes by, and blows Fifer's house down (except for the roof). Fifer manages to escape and hides at Fiddler's house. The wolf pretends to give up and go home, but returns disguised as an innocent sheep. The pigs see through the disguise ("Not by the hair of our chinny-chin-chin! You can't fool us with that old sheep skin!"), whereupon the Wolf blows Fiddler's house down (except for the door). The two pigs manage to escape and hide at Practical's house. The Wolf arrives disguised as a Fuller Brush man to trick the pigs into letting him in, but fails. When the Wolf tries to blow down the house of Practical, blowing off his suspenders and pants in the process, but the brick house is too strong for him. The Wolf jumps on the roof to enter the house by the chimney. Practical Pig takes off the lid of a boiling pot filled with water (to which he adds turpentine) under the chimney, and the Wolf falls with his naked lower in the pot. The Wolf runs away, while sleighing on his naked lower, while the pigs sing "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" again. Then Practical plays a trick on the others by knocking on his piano, causing the other two pigs to think the Wolf has returned and hide under Practical's bed.
==Voice cast==
*Mary Moder - Fifer Pig
*Dorothy Compton - Fiddler Pig
*Pinto Colvig - Practical Pig, Wolf as sheep and Jewish Peddler (original)
*Billy Bletcher - Big Bad Wolf
*Marcellite Garner - Laughing Pigs
*Jimmy MacDonald - Wolf as Jewish Peddler (re-dub)
*Carl Stalling - Practical Pig's piano playing
==Reaction and legacy==
The short was phenomenally successful with audiences of the day, so much that theaters ran the cartoon for months after its debut, to great financial response. 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, and remained on top of animation until Disney was able to boost Mickey's popularity further by making him a top merchandise icon by the end of 1934.
Animator Chuck Jones said, "That was the first time that anybody ever brought characters to life [in an animated cartoon]. They were three characters who looked alike and acted differently". (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."
==Song==
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. 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 Adolf Hitler to make considerable acquisitions of territory without going to war, and was notably used in Disney animations for the Canadian war effort.
The song was further used as the inspiration for the title of the 1963 play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which was made into a film in 1966.
==Censorship==
One sequence in the cartoon which showed the Big Bad Wolf dressed as a Jewish peddler was excised from the film for its re-release in 1948 and was re-animated so the Wolf would be a Fuller Brush Man, albeit less offensive. A coat, glasses, and hat disguise also remained. This edit is made obvious by the fact that there is a notable difference in the quality of the original animation and the re-animated Fuller Brush Man sequence, with the new animated sequence having slightly less detailed background art than the original animation.
Airings on American television have edited this further by using the original Fuller Brush Man footage and redubbing the Wolf's voice so that he does not sound stereotypically Jewish.
When the short was released on home video, the reanimated scene was used for this and all subsequent home video releases. The audio for the international releases stayed intact but used the original Fuller Brush Man scene.
==Sequels==
Disney produced several sequels to Three Little Pigs, though none of them 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 Three Little Wolves and it was so called because it introduced the Big Bad Wolf's three pup 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, Li'l 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.
==Warner Bros. cartoons==
Three 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 second was The Three Little Bops, featuring the pigs as a jazz band, who refused to let the inept trumpet-playing wolf join, even after he blew the straw and stick clubs down with his playing and failed to take down the brick club after he couldn't blow it down, until after he died from his last attempt and went to Hell, whereupon his playing markedly improved. Both of these cartoons were directed by ex-Disney animator Friz Freleng. The third film was The Windblown Hare, featuring Bugs Bunny, and directed by Robert McKimson. In "Windblown", Bugs is conned by the pigs (who were aware of how their story goes) into buying the straw and sticks houses, both of which the wolf blows down. After these incidents and a reenactment of Little Red Riding Hood, Bugs decides to help the wolf and get revenge on all three pigs, who are now at the brick house which Bugs helps the wolf blow down with dynamite.
==The Three Little Pigs in Mexican cinema==
There is an animated sequence made by Walt Disney Studios of the Three Little Pigs in the film Crí Crí: el grillito cantor. This is actually the only known work the Disney studios has made for another cinematographic company. The film was a biography of the Mexican children's music composer Francisco Gabilondo Soler, directed by Tito Davison, produced by Carlos Amador Productions, and released in 1963. The animated sequence is used to illustrate one of the songs, called "Los Cochinitos Dormilones" and then it narrates a short history in which the pigs must participate in "la Fiesta de las Flores" in order to help their mother who desperately needs money to pay the rent to the Big Bad Wolf. This sequence also reuses some of the footage from The Three Caballeros. The animated sequence can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CehHln9L3pw
==In Popular Culture==
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.
A miniature set of the pigs’ homes is featured in the Storybook Land Canal Boats attraction in Disneyland Park (Anaheim).
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.
Fiddler Pig, Fifer Pig, and Zeke the Wolf appeared in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
A coffee and sandwich shop at Buena Vista Street in Disney California Adventure is named Fiddler, Fifer & Practical Cafe in homage to the pigs. The shop is decorated with a motif of fifes, fiddles and pianos.
The pigs also appear in the video game Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two.
Practical Pig, Fiddler Pig, Fifer Pig, and Zeke the Wolf appeared in Once Upon a Studio.
==Trivia==
*The German (except for the title card), Italian, and European Portuguese audio tracks are PAL-pitched on Disney+.
==Releases==
===Television===
*Disneyland, episode #1.17: "Cavalcade of Songs"
*Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, episode #27.9: "Pollyanna"
*The New Mickey Mouse Club, November 8, 1977
*Walt Disney's Mickey and Donald, episode #37
*Mouseterpiece Theater, April 1983
*Good Morning, Mickey, episode #68
*Mickey's Mouse Tracks, episode #35
*Donald's Quack Attack, episode #86
*Sing Me a Story with Belle: "Reap What You Sow"
*The Ink and Paint Club, episode 1.1: "Award Winners"
*The Ink and Paint Club, episode #1.19: "The Big Bad Wolves"
*Treasures from the Disney Vault, October 28, 2015
===Home video===
====VHS====
*Walt Disney Cartoon Classics: More of Disney's Best: 1932-1946 (1950s reissue print without Buena Vista logo)
*Disney Favorite Stories: Three Little Pigs (original release print with 1948 reissue audio)
*Walt Disney's Fables: Volume 5
====DVD====
*Walt Disney Treasures: Silly Symphonies
*Walt Disney Animation Collection: Classic Short Films, Vol. 2: Three Little Pigs
*Walt Disney's Fables: Volume 5
===Streaming===
*Disney+, November 12, 2019
==Gallery==
1933-cochons-03.jpg
1933-cochons-04.jpg
1933-cochons-05.jpg
1933-cochons-11.jpg
1933-cochons-06.jpg
1933-cochons-07.jpg
THREE LITTLE PIGS.png
The Three Little Pigs piano.jpg
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18705.jpg|Notice in the background the rather dark joke with a framed picture of sausage links labeled "FATHER".
3a.jpg|The original "Fuller Brush Man" scene.
1933-cochons-09.jpg
18711.jpg|The re-animated "Fuller Brush Man" scene.
1933-cochons-10.jpg
1933-cochons-08.jpg
Tbbw2.png|The wolf tries to grab the doorknob while he's naked.
Tbbw4.png|The wolf naked at the chimney
3LPreis1.jpg|1948 reissue poster
3LPreis2.jpg|1968 reissue poster
Original 3 little pigs poster.jpg
Wolf-drawing-500.jpg
Threelilpigs-wolf-model.jpg
Threelilpigs-model-600.jpg
Three-little-pigs-story-sketch-600.jpg|Story sketches of the opening sequence.
ThreeLittlePigs.jpg|Record album paired with an audio recording of Orphan's Benefit
Walt Disney's Academy Award Revue.jpg
ar:الخنازير الثلاثة
da:De tre små grise
es:The Three Little Pigs
fr:Les Trois Petits Cochons
it:I tre porcellini (film)
pt-br:Os Três Porquinhos (curta)
ru:Три поросёнка (мультфильм)
Category:Animated shorts
Category:Silly Symphonies
Category:Best Short Academy Award winners
Category:1933 shorts
Category:National Film Registry films
Category:Mickey's Philharmagic
Category:Disney Tsum Tsum
Category:Academy Award winning films