Three Little Pigs (film)

Last updated
Three Little Pigs
Three Little Pigs poster.jpg
Promotional poster
Directed by Burt Gillett
Based on The Three Little Pigs
Produced by Walt Disney
Starring
Music by
Animation by Fred Moore
Jack King
Dick Lundy
Norm Ferguson
Art Babbitt [1]
Color processTechnicolor
Production
company
Distributed by United Artists
Release date
  • May 25, 1933 (1933-05-25)
Running time
8 min
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$22,000
Box office$250,000

Three Little Pigs is a 1933 animated short film released by United Artists, produced by Walt Disney and directed by Burt Gillett. [2] Based on the fable of the same name, the Silly Symphony won the 1934 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. The short cost $22,000 and grossed $250,000. [3]

Contents

In 1994, it was voted #11 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field. [4] 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".

Three Little Pigs premiered at the Radio City Music Hall as a short subject to Radio City's release of the First National Pictures film Elmer, the Great on May 25, 1933, in New York City.

Plot

Fifer Pig, Fiddler Pig and Practical Pig are three brothers who build their own houses. All three of them play a different kind of musical instrument – Fifer the flute, Fiddler the violin and Practical 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 'cause work and play don't mix", focusing on building his strong brick house. Fifer and Fiddler poke fun at him, but Practical warns them when the Wolf comes, they won't be able to escape. 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, at which point Fifer and Fiddler reveal that they are in fact very afraid of the wolf, so the two pigs each retreat to their respective houses. The Wolf first blows Fifer's house down (except for the roof) with little resistance and 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, 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 door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman 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.

Voice cast

Reaction and legacy

The cartoon premiered on May 25, 1933 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. [5]

The cartoon was phenomenally successful with audiences of the day, so much that theaters ran the cartoon for months after its debut, to great financial response. [6] The cartoon is still considered to be the most successful animated short ever made, [7] 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. [8] 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. 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. [9] [10] 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. [11]

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 film. Disney's slogan, often repeated over the years, was "You can't top pigs with pigs." [12]

Controversy and censorship

The cartoon features a scene in which the Big Bad Wolf disguises himself as a peddler for Fuller brushes in an attempt to trick Practical Pig into allowing him to enter his brick house. In the original 1933 release, the peddler disguise is that of a stereotypical Jewish man, complete with a hat, a coat, a fake Jewish nose, glasses, and a fake beard; also, Yiddish music plays as the wolf disguises his voice with a strong Yiddish accent whilst saying "I'm the Fuller Brush man. I'm giving a free sample." [13]

Shortly after the film's release, Rabbi J.X. Cohen (the director of the American Jewish Congress) wrote angrily to Walt Disney, calling the scene "vile, revolting and unnecessary as to constitute as direct affront on Jews" and demanded the scene to be removed. [14] Roy O. Disney, speaking on Walt's behalf, responded to Cohen by saying: "We have a great many Jewish business associates and friends, and certainly would avoid purposely demeaning the Jews or any other race or nationality. … It seems to us that this character is no more [offensive] than [how] many well-known Jewish comedians portray themselves in vaudeville, stage, and screen characterizations." [15] [16] [14]

The "Fuller Brush Man" scene from the 1933 release of the film, at left, and from the 1948 rerelease, at right Three Little Pigs - Fuller Brush Man 1933 and 1948.png
The "Fuller Brush Man" scene from the 1933 release of the film, at left, and from the 1948 rerelease, at right

When the short was reissued in September 1948, the scene was re-animated with the Wolf's disguise now only including a different pair of glasses, along with the same aforementioned hat and coat. His disguised voice no longer has a thick Yiddish accent and the line is changed to "I'm the Fuller Brush man. I'm working my way through college." Jack Hannah and his unit handled these changes; he told historian Jim Korkis that Walt Disney requested him to make these changes (despite there being no outside pressure for him to do so) simply because he felt the scene wasn't funny anymore and potentially hurtful after World War II. [17]

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. [18] 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 Fuehrer Adolf Hitler to make considerable acquisitions of territory without going to war; it was also notably used in Disney animations for the Canadian war effort. [19]

The song was further used as the inspiration for the title of the 1963 play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and its 1966 film adaptation; however, both the play and the film adaptation have no relation to the song or the cartoon that it came from.

The song was parodied in September 1989 during the stunt of WFLZ in Tampa, Florida, competing against its nearby competitor WRBQ after WRBQ failed to fill a ransom to be the only Top 40/CHR radio station in the Tampa Bay area. WFLZ then started to mock and belittle its competitor, including a "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" parody entitled "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Q?"

Home media

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. It came out on VHS again in the US as part of the Favorite Stories collection in 1995 and in the UK in the spring of 1996 as part of the Disney Storybook Favourites series, the latter with (possibly in error) the Jewish peddler animation restored, albeit with the reworked dialogue. It was released on December 4, 2001 (along with its sequels) as part of the Walt Disney Treasures: Silly Symphonies DVD, [20] with the PAL release again retaining the Jewish peddler animation along with the reworked dialogue. [2] The Disney+ release of the short, however, uses the altered animation in all regions.

It was later included in Walt Disney's Timeless Tales, Vol. 1, released on August 16, 2005 (featuring the edited version in the US Silly Symphonies set), 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).

Sequels and later appearances

Comic adaptations

The Silly Symphony Sunday comic strip ran a seven-month-long continuation of Three Little Pigs called "The Further Adventures of the Three Little Pigs" from January 18 to August 23, 1936. This was followed by another storyline called "The Practical Pig" from May 1 to August 7, 1938. [28]

The anthology comic book Walt Disney's Comics and Stories introduced a new character, Lil Bad Wolf (the son of the Big Bad Wolf), in issue #52 (January 1945). [29] 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. New stories about Lil Bad Wolf appeared regularly in WDC&S for seven years, with the last one appearing in issue #259 (April 1962). [30]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Three Little Pigs</span> Fairy tale

"The Three Little Pigs" is a fable about three pigs who build their houses of different materials. A Big Bad Wolf blows down the first two pigs' houses which are made of straw and sticks respectively, but is unable to destroy the third pig's house that is made of bricks. The printed versions of this fable date back to the 1840s, but the story is thought to be much older. The earliest version takes place in Dartmoor with three pixies and a fox before its best known version appears in English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs in 1890, with Jacobs crediting James Halliwell-Phillipps as the source. In 1886, Halliwell-Phillipps had published his version of the story, in the fifth edition of his Nursery Rhymes of England, and it included, for the first time in print, the now-standard phrases "not by the hair of my chiny chin chin" and "I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house in".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Al Taliaferro</span> American comics artist

Charles Alfred "Al" Taliaferro, was an American Disney comics artist who produced Disney comic strips for King Features Syndicate. Taliaferro is best known for his work on the Donald Duck comic strip. Many of his strips were written by Bob Karp.

<i>The Wise Little Hen</i> 1934 Silly Symphony cartoon

The Wise Little Hen is a 1934 Walt Disney's Silly Symphony cartoon, based on the fable The Little Red Hen. The cartoon features the debut of Donald Duck, dancing to "The Sailor's Hornpipe". Donald and his friend Peter Pig try to avoid work by faking stomach aches until Mrs. Hen teaches them the value of labor.

Silly Symphony is an American animated series of 75 musical short films produced by Walt Disney Productions from 1929 to 1939. As the series name implies, the Silly Symphonies were originally intended as whimsical accompaniments to pieces of music. As such, the films usually did not feature continuing characters, unlike the Mickey Mouse shorts produced by Disney at the same time. The series is notable for its innovation with Technicolor and the multiplane motion picture camera, as well as its introduction of the character Donald Duck, who made his first appearance in the Silly Symphony cartoon The Wise Little Hen in 1934. Seven shorts won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Big Bad Wolf</span> Fairy tale character

The Big Bad Wolf is a fictional wolf appearing in several cautionary tales, including some of Grimms' Fairy Tales. Versions of this character have appeared in numerous works, and it has become a generic archetype of a menacing predatory antagonist.

<i>Pigs in a Polka</i> 1943 animated short film directed by Friz Freleng

Pigs in a Polka is a 1943 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon series directed by Friz Freleng. The short was released on February 6, 1943.

<i>Little Red Riding Rabbit</i> 1944 animated short film directed by Friz Freleng

Little Red Riding Rabbit is a 1944 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon, directed by Friz Freleng, and starring Bugs Bunny. It is a sendup of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, and is the first time in which Mel Blanc receives a voice credit.

Dorothy Compton was an American voice actress born in the early 1900s. An early friend of Walt Disney, she made her first acting debut in The Three Little Pigs (1933) as the voice of Fifer Pig. From 1933 onward she made more appearances in the next 3 installments of the Three Little Pigs: The Big Bad Wolf (1934), The Three Little Wolves (1936) and The Practical Pig (1939) along with minor appearances in It's Great to Be Alive (1933) and I Married an Angel (1942).

<i>Toby Tortoise Returns</i> 1936 animated Technicolor cartoon

Toby Tortoise Returns is an animated Technicolor cartoon in Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies series, directed by Wilfred Jackson. It is a sequel to the 1935 short The Tortoise and the Hare, and premiered on August 22, 1936.

<i>The Practical Pig</i> 1939 American film

The Practical Pig is a Silly Symphony cartoon. It was released on February 24, 1939, and was directed by Dick Rickard. It was the fourth and final cartoon starring The Three Pigs. Like its predecessors, The Practical Pig incorporates the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?". Unlike its predecessors however, its title cards labeled it as a standalone Three Little Pigs cartoon, suggesting that they were to get their own series of cartoons. It is also the second-to-last Silly Symphony cartoon.

<i>Three Little Wolves</i> (film) Three Little Wolves film

Three Little Wolves is a Silly Symphony cartoon. Released on April 18, 1936, and directed by Dave Hand. It was the third Silly Symphony cartoon starring the Three Little Pigs. It is loosely based on The Boy Who Cried Wolf. It introduces the Big Bad Wolf's sons, the Three Little Wolves, all of them just as eager for a taste of the pigs as their father.

The first wave of Walt Disney Treasures was released on December 4, 2001. It includes four different DVD sets.

"Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" is a popular song written by Frank Churchill with additional lyrics by Ann Ronell, which originally featured in the 1933 Disney cartoon Three Little Pigs, where it was sung by Fiddler Pig and Fifer Pig as they arrogantly believe the Big Bad Wolf is not a serious threat. The song created a market for future Disney tunes and led to a contract with Irving Berlin Publishing Co. that same year, securing the sheet music rights over Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies. The song's theme made it a huge hit during the second half of 1933. As Neal Gabler wrote in his 2007 biography of Walt Disney, the song "indisputably became the nation's new anthem, its cheerful whoop hurled in the face of hard times." It remains one of the most well-known Disney songs, being covered by numerous artists and musical groups.

<i>Mother Goose Goes Hollywood</i> 1938 Silly Symphony cartoon

Mother Goose Goes Hollywood is a 1938 animated short film produced by Walt Disney Productions and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures. The short was released on December 23, 1938. The film parodies several Mother Goose nursery rhymes using caricatures of popular Hollywood film stars of the 1930s. The film was directed by Wilfred Jackson and was the third-to-last Silly Symphony produced.

<i>The Big Bad Wolf</i> (1934 film) 1934 animated short film

The Big Bad Wolf is an animated short released on April 13, 1934, by United Artists, produced by Walt Disney and directed by Burt Gillett as part of the Silly Symphony series. Acting partly as a sequel to the wildly successful adaptation of The Three Little Pigs of the previous year, this film also acts as an adaptation of the fairy-tale Little Red Riding Hood, with the Big Bad Wolf from 1933's Three Little Pigs acting as the adversary to Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother.

<i>Three Orphan Kittens</i> 1935 American film

Three Orphan Kittens is a 1935 animated short film in the Silly Symphonies series produced by Walt Disney Productions. It was the winner of the 1935 Oscar for Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons). It was followed in 1936 by a sequel, More Kittens.

<i>Three Blind Mouseketeers</i> 1936 American film

Three Blind Mouseketeers is a Silly Symphonies cartoon based on the nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice and the 1844 novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Directed by Dave Hand and Jack Cutting, it stars Billy Bletcher.

Mother Goose Melodies is a 1931 Silly Symphonies animated film, directed by Burt Gillett. Two years later it was semi remade in Technicolor as Old King Cole.

<i>The Thrifty Pig</i> 1941 film by Ford Beebe

The Thrifty Pig is a four-minute educational short animated film made by Walt Disney Studios for the National Film Board of Canada. A World War II propaganda film, it was released theatrically on November 19, 1941, as part of a series of four films directed at the Canadian public to learn about war bonds. The Thrifty Pig was directed by Ford Beebe. It is also a remake of the 1933 film of the same name.

Silly Symphony is a weekly Disney comic strip that debuted on January 10, 1932, as a topper for the Mickey Mouse strip's Sunday page. The strip featured adaptations of Walt Disney's popular short film series, Silly Symphony, which released 75 cartoons from 1929 to 1939, as well as other cartoons and animated films. The comic strip outlived its parent series by six years, ending on October 7, 1945.

References

  1. ↑ "Walt Disney's "Three Little Pigs" (1933) -". cartoonresearch.com.
  2. 1 2 Merritt, Russell; Kaufman, J. B. (2016). Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies: A Companion to the Classic Cartoon Series (2nd ed.). Glendale, CA: Disney Editions. pp. 126–129. ISBN   978-1-4847-5132-9.
  3. ↑ Balio, Tino (2009). United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 116. ISBN   978-0-299-23004-3.
  4. ↑ Beck, Jerry (1994). The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals. Turner Publishing. ISBN   978-1878685490.
  5. ↑ Doherty, Thomas (1999). Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-34. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 69. ISBN   9780231110952.
  6. ↑ "Chronology of the Walt Disney Company (1934)". www.islandnet.com.
  7. ↑ "Huffing and Puffing about Three Little Pigs • Senses of Cinema". www.sensesofcinema.com. 31 July 2006.
  8. ↑ "The Walt Disney Family Museum - Find animation, innovation, and inspiration and immerse yourself in the remarkable life story of Walt Disney". disney.go.com.
  9. ↑ Lee, Newton; Krystina Madej (2012). Disney Stories: Getting to Digital. London: Springer Science+Business Media. pp. 55–56. ISBN   9781461421016.
  10. ↑ Krasniewicz, Louise (2010). Walt Disney: A Biography. Santa Barbara: Greenwood. pp. 60–64. ISBN   9780313358302.
  11. ↑ Gabler, Neal (2007). Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Vintage Books. pp. 181–189. ISBN   9780679757474.
  12. ↑ Gabler, Neal (2007). Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Vintage Books. p. 415. ISBN   9780679757474 . Retrieved 14 March 2015.
  13. ↑ "The Three Little Pigs. (Walt Disney, 1933) | UC Berkeley Library". www.lib.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2020-04-06.
  14. 1 2 Gabler, Neal (2006). Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Alfred A Knopf. p. 448. ASIN   0679757473.
  15. ↑ Korkis, Jim (2017). Call Me Walt: Everything You Never Knew About Walt Disney. Theme Park Press. pp. 151–152. ASIN   1683901010.
  16. ↑ Korkis, Jim (September 20, 2017). "Debunking Myths About Walt Disney". MousePlanet.com. Retrieved 26 December 2023.
  17. ↑ Korkis, Jim (February 19, 2014). "Debunking Meryl Streep: Part One". MousePlanet.com. Retrieved 26 December 2023.
  18. ↑ "Insider - Oh My Disney". Oh My Disney.
  19. ↑ Vilas-Boas, Eric; Maher, John, eds. (October 5, 2020). "The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation". Vulture . When fascism began bubbling up in Europe, the pigs with houses of straw and sticks were repurposed as a desperate warning call to Western nations not taking the Nazi threat seriously.
  20. ↑ "Silly Symphonies: The Historic Musical Animated Classics DVD Review". DVD Dizzy. Retrieved 20 February 2021.
  21. ↑ "Big Bad Wolf, The (film)". D23. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
  22. ↑ "Three Little Wolves (film)". D23. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
  23. ↑ "Practical Pig, The (film)". D23. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
  24. ↑ "Thrifty Pig, The (film)". D23. Retrieved 31 January 2020.
  25. ↑ Reif, Alex (October 16, 2023). "Disney's "Once Upon a Studio" – List of Characters in Order of Appearance". Laughing Place.
  26. ↑ Disney Magic Kingdoms (Gameloft) (September 6, 2024). "PATCH NOTES – UPDATE 86: SILLY SYMPHONY".
  27. ↑ Disney Magic Kingdoms (Gameloft) (September 10, 2024). "Update 86: Silly Symphony | Update Trailer". YouTube.
  28. ↑ Taliaferro, Al; Osborne, Ted; De Maris, Merrill (2016). Silly Symphonies: The Complete Disney Classics, vol 2. San Diego: IDW Publishing. ISBN   978-1631408045.
  29. ↑ "Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #52". Inducks . Retrieved 26 July 2019.
  30. ↑ "Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #52". Inducks . Retrieved 26 July 2019.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.