Ferdinand

Director: Carlos Saldanha
Release date: December 10, 2017
Rating: ★★★
Review:

The classic children’s book ‘The Story of Ferdinand’ by writer Munro Leaf and illustrator Robert Lawson appeared in 1936, and already in 1938 Walt Disney turned, quite faithfully, the story into an animated short called ‘Ferdinand the Bull’.

Of course, for its twelfth feature length film the Blue Sky studio had to expand the story. Like in the book and like Disney’s film Ferdinand is a flower loving bull who refuses to fight, but who ends up in the arena, anyway. There the similarities stop. To this core the studio added a lot of characters and complications. In the process the book’s essentially pacifistic character has been replaced by a more generic message that being gentle, friendly, and helpful doesn’t mean that one is weak, on the contrary. Also added is that all-American dream that one can change the world oneself (“It does not have to be this way” one can hear repeatedly in the movie).

The studio transfers the story to present day Spain and adds a background story of young Ferdinand growing up in a place called ‘Casa del toro’. Young Ferdinand sees his father off into the arena, never to return. This prompts the peaceful calf to escape, and somewhere in the neighborhood of Ronda (the town’s famous Puente Nuevo can be seen in some of the background views from Ferdinand’s flower hill) Ferdinand is found and adopted by a girl called Nina and her father Juan, a flower farmer.

After thirteen minutes young Ferdinand turns into his adult counterpart, and he has grown into a big bull, indeed. When he ends up at ‘Casa del Toro’ again, Ferdinand has a hard time keeping his pacifist ideals, and even worse, he learns a terrible truth about bullfighting, prompting him to rescue his fellow casa inmates.

Woven into this story are a lot of extra characters, rather crowding the story. At Nina’s place there’s a dog called Paco (weakly voiced by Jerrod Carmichael), while ‘Casa del Toro’ features five other bulls, a female “calming” goat called Lupe (a nice voice job by Kate McKinnon), three German horses, and three hedgehogs, which are strange enough rendered in purples and blues. The three German horses add to the fun, but are hardly essential to the plot, and particularly the three hedgehogs come across as stock characters. These three drive a car in a scene that seems directly stolen from ‘Toy Story 2’ in which other small characters manage to drive together.

True, ‘Ferdinand’ is well told, and knows no dead moments. But it doesn’t hold any surprises, either, and the film feels frustratingly run-of-the-mill. Even the gags are disappointingly predictable. The chase scene in Madrid is inspired, but the all too sweet finale is a letdown: there’s absolutely no drama or conflict left in the end. Meanwhile, the charm of the original book gets completely lost in all the antics of Ferdinand’s co-stars, and the sometimes gross out humor (for example, Lupe repeatedly throws up things). It’s also worthwhile to mention that the film is less anti-bullfighting than one would hope.

The film also feels lackluster visually: there are no interesting character designs, and even some ugly ones (some of the humans, a problem troubling the studio since its first Ice Age movie). There is some stylization (for example the bark of the tree on Ferdinand’s hill, a cartoony bee and an almost mechanical butterfly), but this is not carried through consistently. The rendering, too, feels poor, especially when compared to the contemporary ‘Coco’, giving the characters a hard edge and all too saturated colors. The background art, too, is rather simple and uninspired. Even worse, some of the animation is shockingly stiff, especially that of Nina and Juan. On the upside, there are some nicely staged scenes, like Ferdinand entering the slaughterhouse, or Ferdinand entering the ring. In the latter scene, the camera swoops around Ferdinand while he walks into the arena, capturing both the overwhelming scenery and Ferdinand’s reaction to it.

In all ‘Ferdinand’ is not bad, but it’s no classic, either, as the film is as entertaining as it is forgettable.

Watch the trailer for ‘Ferdinand’ yourself and tell me what you think: