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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 In the process the book’s essentially pacifistic character has been replaced by a more generic message that being gentle, friendly, and helpful doesn’t mean that one is weak, on the contrary.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
Directors: John Foster & George Stallings
Release Date: October 7, 1932
Stars: Tom and Jerry
Rating: ★★
Review
Somehow Tom and Jerry are shipwrecked and plagued by an evil octopus. Lucky for them they’re washed ashore in Spain, where they immediately go to a Spanish cafe.
At the cafe they encounter two female dancers, and an angry guy who orders them to take part in a bullfight. In the arena Tom and Jerry defeat a battalion of bulls with their bare hands. Then a telegraph arrives to tell them the 18th amendment has been lifted, and immediately Tom and Jerry head home again on their raft…
The 18th amendment, abolishing alcohol, was not lifted until December 5, 1933, more than one year after the release of ‘A Spanish Twist’ , making this cartoon strangely prophetic. Unfortunately, it’s hardly enjoyable otherwise. The Spanish dancers are extremely badly drawn, and the bullfight is anything from entertaining. In fact, ‘A Spanish Twist’ is arguably the worst bullfight cartoon before the equally dull Pink Panther cartoon ‘Toro Pink’ (1979).
Watch ‘A Spanish Twist’ yourself and tell me what you think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMqkbEOKAp0
This is Tom & Jerry cartoon No. 16
To the previous Tom & Jerry cartoon: Barnyard Bunk
To the next Tom & Jerry cartoon: Piano Tooners
‘A Spanish Twist’ is available on the DVD ‘The Complete Animated Adventures of Van Beuren Studio’s Tom and Jerry’
Director: Walt Disney
Release Date: September 7, 1929
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘El Terrible Toreador’ is the second entry of the Silly Symphonies. It has been far lesser known than the first, ‘The Skeleton Dance‘, which is no surprise, because it contains none of the ingredients which made ‘The Skeleton Dance’ a classic: there’s no interesting mood, no spectacular animation, and there are hardly any funny gags.
Unlike the other early Silly Symphonies, ‘El Terrible Toreador’ is more silly than symphony-like. That is: it’s more of a ‘story’ consisting of silly gags than the song-and-dance-routine typical of the Silly Symphonies up to 1931.
The cartoon consists of two parts: in the first part we watch a Spanish canteen, where a large officer and a toreador are fighting for the love of a waitress. In the second part, the toreador is fighting and dancing with a bull in the arena. Surprisingly, the story of the first part is hardly developed here: the cartoon ends when the toreador has pulled the bull inside out, thus ending the fight.
‘El Terrible Toreador’ is notable for being Disney’s first attempt at the human form since the early 1920s. However, the humans are a far cry from ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ from (only) eight years later. In this early cartoon the human characters are extraordinarily flexible and they do not move lifelike at all (I noticed I thought of them as bugs some of the time).
The most interesting feature of this short is Carl Stalling’s score. His music already bears his signature and contains many citations from ‘Carmen’ by Georges Bizet.
Watch ‘El Terrible Toreador’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Silly Symphony No. 2
To the previous Silly Symphony: The Skeleton Dance
To the next Silly Symphony: Springtime
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 