You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘goat’ tag.
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 In the process the book’s essentially pacifistic character has been replaced by a more generic message that being gentle, friendly, and helpful doesn’t mean that one is weak, on the contrary.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:
‘Ferdinand’ is available on Blu-Ray and DVD
Director: Dave Fleischer
Release Date: August 22, 1941
Stars: Hunky & Spunky
Rating: ★
Review:
‘Vitamin Hay’ was the very last of the Color Classics, a series that arguably already had run out of steam by 1938.
‘Vitamin Hay’ seems to have appeared almost as an afterthought, being released almost a year after the second to last Color Classic, ‘You Can’t Shoe a Horsefly‘. Like the previous three Color Classic cartoons it starred the boring burro duo of Hunky and Spunky.
This time Spunky refuses to eat his ‘vitamin hay’, and joins a goat in eating car parts. When he swallows a car horn he gets into trouble with some angry geese, and Hunky, once again, has to come to the rescue.
Hunky and Spunky never were remotely interesting to watch, and certainly not fit for the more adult war era, so I doubt whether anyone missed them when they were shelved. ‘Vitamin Hay’, is a fitting farewell to the donkeys, being as tiresome and as devoid of humor as the worst of their previous cartoons. Luckily, the Fleischer had a new, more daring star with ‘Superman‘. Yet he, like Popeye, had not been conceived by themselves, leaving Koko the Clown and Betty Boop the Fleischer’s only two successful creations during the long existence of their studio.
In hindsight the Fleischers’ Color Classics were a disappointing series that never fulfilled their promise. They never approached the quality of their original, Disney’s Silly Symphonies’, and most entries were ill-fated attempts at emulating the Disney style, resulting in sugary, childish and terribly unfunny cartoons. It was clear that in this series the Fleischers tried to be something they were not. This was a pity, for the contemporary Popeye series proved that they needn’t to. In the Popeye cartoons the Fleischers could stay true to themselves, producing some of the best shorts of the 1930s, including several classics, where in my opinion the Color Classics produced none, bar the very first one, the Betty Boop vehicle ‘Poor Cinderella‘ (1934).
Watch ‘Vitamin Hay’ yourself and tell me what you think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QkWMAIQp5Y
‘Vitamin Hay’ is available on the DVD set ‘Somewhere in Dreamland – Max Fleischer’s Color Classics: The Definitive Collection’
Director: Clyde Geronimi
Release Date: May 22, 1942
Stars: Pluto
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘The Army Mascot’ is the first of two World War Two cartoons starring Pluto (the other one being ‘Private Pluto‘ from 1943).
Pluto never gets really involved in the war, though, he only joins the army. He was the second Disney character to do so, following Donald Duck, who had been drafted only three weeks earlier, in ‘Donald Gets Drafted‘.
However, Pluto’s reasons to join the army are doubtful, to say the least: only when he sees the enormous portions of meat an army mascot gets, he wants to be one, too. He tries to replace “Gunther Goat”, mascot of the Yoo-hoo Division, but all he gets is cans. In his second attempt he tries to chew tobacco like Gunther can, to impress the soldiers. But Gunther makes Pluto swallow the whole piece, making him sick. This sequence is the highlight of the cartoon, as Pluto’s sickness is animated in the most ridiculous way.
Gunther then tries to finish his rival off by bumping Pluto into the munition depot, but it’s Gunther himself who bumps into the depot, which explodes, blasting the wicked goat up into the air, where he’s caught by a plane and carried away into the distance. Now Pluto takes Gunther’s place, and gets his steak after all.
‘The Army Mascot’ is a rather odd cartoon, where both main characters show unpleasant behavior: Pluto envy and trickery and Gunther haughtiness and wrath. Thus, ‘The Army Mascot’, although war-themed, can hardly be called a patriotic film.
Watch ‘The Army Mascot’ yourself and tell me what you think:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syEf4nTJcbE
This is Pluto cartoon No. 6
To the previous Pluto cartoon: Pluto Junior
To the next Pluto cartoon: The Sleep Walker
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 