THREE LITTLE PIGS, WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF?

The Three Little Pigs

Today, The Grandma is still at home. She is a little tired and she has preferred to invite her friend Tina Picotes to watch a film on TV. They have chosen Three Little Pigs, an animated short film released on a day like today in 1933.

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 fable of the same name, the Silly Symphony won the 1934 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film of 1933. The short cost $22,000 and grossed $250,000.

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.

More information: Cartoon Research

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 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 is initially seen as working without rest.

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?.

The Three Little Pigs

As they are singing, the Big Bad Wolf really comes by, at which point Fifer and Fiddler reveal they are in fact very afraid of the wolf.

Fifer and Fiddler each retreat to their respective houses; the Wolf first blows Fifer's house down, except for the roof, with little resistance. 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, who willingly gives his brothers refuge; in Practical's house, it is revealed that his musical instrument is the piano. The Wolf arrives disguised as a Jewish peddler/Fuller Brush man to trick the pigs into letting him in, but fails. The Wolf then tries to blow down the strong brick house, losing his clothing in the process, but is unable, all while a confident Practical plays melodramatic piano music.

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, to which he adds turpentine, 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. Practical then plays a trick by knocking on his piano, causing his brothers to think the Wolf has returned and hide under Practical's bed.

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The movie was phenomenally successful with audiences of the day, so much that theaters ran the cartoon for months after its debut, to great financial response. 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 observed, 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.

The Three Little Pigs

Fifer and Fiddler Pig are frivolous and care-free; Practical Pig is cautious and earnest. The reason for why the film's story and characters were so well developed was that Disney had already realized the success of animated films depended upon telling emotionally gripping stories that would grab the audience and not let go.

This realization led to an important innovation around the time Pigs was in development: a story department, separate from the animators, with storyboard artists who would be dedicated to working on a story development phase of the production pipeline. 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.

More information: TV Tropes

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?

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 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 third film was The Windblown Hare, featuring Bugs Bunny, and directed by Robert McKimson.

In Windblown, Bugs is conned into first buying the straw house, which the wolf blows down, and then the sticks house, which the wolf also blows down. After these incidents, Bugs decides to help the wolf and get revenge on all three pigs, who are now at the brick house.

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Cartooning at its best is a fine art.

I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, 

which also allows me to paint my cartoons.

Ralph Bakshi