Three Little Pigs (1933) - Kozak's Classic Cinema

Three Little Pigs (1933). 8 minutes. Produced by Walt Disney. Directed by Burt Gillett. Featuring the voices of Dorothy Compton (as the piper pig), Mary Moder (as the fiddler pig), Pinto Colvig (as the bricklayer pig), and Billy Bletcher (as the big bad wolf). Animated by Fred Moore, Jack King, Dick Lundy, Norm Ferguson, and Art Babbitt.

Walt Disney’s Academy Award-winning cartoon short Three Little Pigs was a massive success when it was released in the early 1930s; it earned a tidy sum of money for Disney and was screened continuously for several months. But Three Little Pigs is also an artistic achievement. Drawing on innovations in sound and color technology that the Disney studio had established earlier in Steamboat Willie (1928) and Flowers and Trees (1932), the 1933 cartoon demonstrates further techniques of individuation that would influence Disney’s first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). But perhaps equally important is the way that Three Little Pigs channels the Zeitgeist of early 1930s American culture and the can-do attitudes expressed during the Great Depression. Overall, Three Little Pigs does not offer a very successful message, in part due to its lack of more compassionate insight into Depression-era realities. But for an eight-minute cartoon short, it offers a surprising amount of cultural subtext.

Because Three Little Pigs is based on a traditional story, is now required viewing for children, and has an iconic musical score, its plot is probably familiar to most. Three musical pigs—a piper pig, a fiddler pig, and an industrious pig (who plays the piano later in the cartoon)—are all shown building their domiciles. The first two pigs construct their houses of flimsy materials (one of straw and one of sticks), and the third builds his house of bricks. While the piper and fiddler pigs love to play their instruments and avoid work, the industrious pig labors diligently to build a sturdy house because “work and play don’t mix.” The first two pigs put him down: “He don’t take no time to play… All he does is work all day.” The bricklayer warns the other pigs about the dangers of a menacing wolf, but they mock the pig, singing “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” Soon the piper and fiddler pigs find themselves in trouble when the big bad wolf arrives and tries to “huff and… puff and… blow [their houses] in.” The two pigs see their houses destroyed and escape to the bricklayer’s house, which withstands the wolf’s huffing and puffing; they burn the wolf with hot turpentine and he runs off. Safe and sound, the three pigs join together in song.

Three Little Pigs is notable in the history of animation for its visual innovations. It has been pointed out by the animator Chuck Jones (whose career began at Leon Schlesinger Productions the year that Three Little Pigs was released) that one of the strengths of the short is the way that it takes three similar pigs and successfully individuates them. There is no confusing the bricklayer pig with the violin-playing pig, for example. Moreover, one can watch the cartoon with the sound off and still perceive the differences among the characters. Variation in dress, musical accessories, facial expression, and voices all work to create three individual characters whose quirky personae feel a world away from those of Steamboat Willie, released roughly five years earlier.

The practice of individuation would eventually be adopted with great success by Disney in the first feature-length cel-animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But unlike Snow White with its frequently cute and goofy dwarfs, Three Little Pigs keeps things on the fringe with its distinctive, ravenous, and salivating wolf. Consider how scraggly and unclean the wolf appears, how lewd his evil smile is. He is even a bit of a peeper as he spies on the pigs from behind a tree. The cartoon is dangling his hunger for the pigs before us like a sleazy threat and establishes the wolf as an unsavory rogue through his idiosyncrasies.

And the piper and fiddler pigs, of course, are only half-dressed in that cartoon way that makes one wonder if the unclothed part reveals nudity or not. As it is, the two pigs are hardly little—their clothing barely fits them. They are ripe for the slaughter as they bounce around in their over-plumpness, giggling and singing in high-pitched voices. There is a certain aspect of both the macabre and the uncanny in what we see that can be lost in the continuous music, the dancing, and the joking. The combination of the light comedy aspect with the somewhat lurid nature of the characterizations gives Three Little Pigs an unpleasant edge.

Three Little Pigs, however, is more than a somewhat unsettling work of entertainment. It also responds to the social and political climate of 1933 with a message of hope and resilience. As many have pointed out, the catchy “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” (performed in the cartoon by all of the pig characters, both hard-working and delinquent) became a kind of anthem for the 1930s, synonymous with standing up to the great wolf of the Depression through bravery, resistance, and positivity. We can kind of see how this might work: for the wolf, much like the Depression, menaces and frightens the pigs with threats of destruction and deprivation. Akin to a hairy, animal version of a U.S. bank—and equipped with a high-powered huffing and puffing that anticipates the Dust Bowl winds, which would become a national concern starting in late 1933—the wolf takes the pigs’ houses and leaves them with nothing. But the pigs endure. True, they are scared, and two of them are nearly killed by the wolf, but the worker pig with his can-do attitude and diligent labor thwarts the destructive forces that seek to consume his colleagues and bring down pig society. Much as Three Little Pigs is a story about the benefits of positive thinking, it also serves as a stark didactic fable about the value of good, old-fashioned, hard work.

Through its action and dialogue, Three Little Pigs proposes that hard work is the key to its characters’ salvation. However, we should question the application of the pigs’ firm, business-minded lesson to the period of the Great Depression and beyond: if labor saves the pigs from certain doom, how then would labor work as a means of saving the world from a global economic crisis? After all, a person could be as industrious as possible and shun fun—would that spare them from the clutch of the wolf during a financial cataclysm? Unlike the cartoon’s building crisis, the Depression was not caused by a lack of hard work, and a dearth of resourcefulness in the face of devastation is not what brought the U.S. to its knees economically. The insinuation that hard work will save the day makes sense in the context of an animated story about pig architecture, but in reality many people were fully prepared to work during the Depression and could not find steady employment. It is hard to apply lessons from the world of the pigs with its shortage of wise, disciplined labor to the hardship experienced by a large segment of the American population.

Still, as a solution for the Depression, Three Little Pigs does not really seem any more unrealistic than other cinematic solutions to the global crisis. So often in movies from this period, the financial woes of individuals are solved by twists of fate and random chance: a dowager great aunt unknown to the protagonist dies and leaves a million-dollar estate to him (in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town [1936]); an heiress randomly selects a hobo to come live in her family’s mansion (in My Man Godfrey [1936]); and roommates learn that the neighbor living next door to them in a quotidian apartment is really fabulously wealthy and eager to share his fortune (Gold Diggers of 1933). It is as if movies could not think their way out of the crisis without a sky of plenty raining down riches on the heads of their characters. Given that movies were in a pie-in-the-sky mode when it came to imagining how society might turn itself around, we can at least say that Three Little Pigs seems a bit more grounded in practical measures than its contemporaries—although even it lacks a sensible view of then-contemporary culture and how the world works.

The success of Three Little Pigs is evident from the numerous musical and film references to it in the early 1930s and beyond. For instance, a version of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” by songwriters Frank Churchill and Ann Ronell was frequently recorded outside of the movies during this period. The composition features a musical recreation of the cartoon plot, complete with spirited instrumentals and squeaky voices for the pigs. The singer provides narration (which is not an element in the cartoon), and is carried along by an original melody that occasionally taps into some of the most prominent musical themes from the cartoon (including the original cartoon’s “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”).

The 1933 version by Ambrose and His Orchestra, featuring vocalist Sam Browne, is a good example of the popular song. Ambrose’s recording successfully channels the humor and pleasures of the original cartoon. The musicians perform superbly, and Sam Browne is charming as our musical guide through the story. The Ambrose recording is only one of at least 18 recordings of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” that were created in 1933 alone in the U.S. and England; and the sheer number of recordings channeling the original cartoon’s story indicates Three Little Pigs’ considerable popularity as a comedic subject. (For a select discography of recordings of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from 1933, please see the end of this post.)

But elsewhere in American culture, the light comedy of Three Little Pigs took on a slightly sinister bent. Clark Gable sings a snippet of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” to Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934). In the scene in question, the two are holed up in a motor lodge together, pretending to be husband and wife so that she can escape the law (she is an heiress who has run away from her father, and Gable, a reporter, is traveling with her to get the inside scoop on her story). While the vulnerable Colbert tries to sleep across the room from him with a only frail sheet hanging on a clothesline to keep her protected from his view, Gable smiles and reclines in his bed, singing the lyrics with a taunting, lascivious tone.

Divorced from its original context of pigs and house building, the song in Gable’s hands becomes laced with sexual danger and erotically tinged provocation. Gable’s version of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” in one of the most successful live-action movies of the 1930s would not have seemed like a perversion of the original song had the Disney version not been easily recognizable. But we must also admit that his character’s naughty singing also takes the song to a new place, one that is amusing but also mildly distressing.

There is a deeper unpleasantness to the cartoon: the original version features a caricature of a Jewish Fuller Brush peddler—a disguise the wolf assumes when he is trying to trick the bricklayer pig into opening the door to his house. As the peddler, the wolf dons a fake, enlarged nose and speaks in an Yiddish-tinged voice while violin music plays. It is clear what the disguise is meant to signify. The Jewish caricature is an example of the Disney studio channeling a Zeitgeist of another, more sinister kind—the anti-Semitic attitudes of the 1930s.

Yet even when the Disney studio received complaints about this moment in the cartoon from the American Jewish Congress, it did not remove or revise the scene. Roy Disney said that what was depicted was not any worse than the caricatures promulgated by Jewish performers. It was only in 1948, 15 years after Three Little Pigs was released, that the cartoon’s anti-Semitic details were removed (including the oversized nose, accented voice, and violin music) and the scene was remade as a vignette with the wolf pretending to peddle brushes but appearing as himself. Presumably something had changed in the studio’s outlook following World War II. Three Little Pigs is a notable early example of insensitive content being revised by the Disney studio in later years as the studio sought to clean up its past and reshape its image.

Three Little Pigs attempts to connect with its audience by means of its cutting-edge animation, by tapping into the Zeitgeist of Depression-era resilience, and through its catchy soundtrack. Yet when considered as a whole, Three Little Pigs is a bit of a tough pill to swallow. Somehow it has become retroactively enshrined, like much of Disney’s output, as a children’s cartoon; but with its lurid wolf, its odd pigs, its stark didactic qualities, and its bigotry all mixed together, it is a world away from the softer Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck fare from later on in the canon. Three Little Pigs is an example of how Disney could manage to innovate in the field of animation and produce iconic cultural touchpoints while infusing its product with a fair amount of weirdness.