Barnyard smells, but where’s the beef?
A padded version of the gentle children’s classic, Ferdinand is all episodic plot, no charm
If you’re familiar with the classic 1936 children’s book The Story of Ferdinand, with its simple storyline and its wondrous black-and-white illustrations — well, you’ll find very little of all that in the newly animated Ferdinand.
Sure, the basic story of a pacifist bull who likes to smell flowers is still there, but the slim volume had to be heavily padded to fill an hour and three quarters of screen time. So before you ask, please note that Munro Leaf’s original did not include a character who vomits when anxious. It didn’t have a thrilling escape from an abattoir. There was no trio of comic-relief hedgehogs. And Leaf never thought to use the newly invented divided motorway to stage an unlikely animal-controlled vehicular getaway, à la Finding Dory.
For all this and numerous other plot points, we can thank a sextet of writers whose previous credits include Big Momma’s House, Monsters University, Yogi Bear and a TV show called Dinotrux. It all comes together under director Carlos Saldanha (Ice Age, Rio). And while it’s not quite dreadful, neither is it the least bit inspired, nor respectful of the original. If you’ll excuse the metaphor, it feels like 10 pounds of bull in a five-pound bag.
Ferdinand the bull is growing up in Casa del Toro, a Spanish ranch, which supplies animals to the bullfights and also to the slaughterhouse. Young Ferdinand escapes and is found and adopted by a girl (Lily Day), whose amazingly indulgent daddy lets her keep the beast. He soon grows into a behemoth, now voiced by John Cena, yet he retains his peaceful demeanour — that is, until he is stung by a bumblebee while at a flower festival. His subsequent misunderstood rampage gets him shipped back to his original home.
The movie stocks Ferdinand’s abode with a menagerie of secondary characters, including a trio of high-strung German show horses, a calming goat (nicely voiced by Kate McKinnon), and David Tennant as a Scottish bull named Angus. The reluctant fighting machine now has to plot his escape all over again, preferably breaking all the other bulls out of the ranch with him.
The equine characters were fun to watch, although I think I was the only viewer at a recent screening who laughed when one of them insulted Ferdinand with: “I bet his parents weren’t even related!” The kids in attendance were more taken with their physical humour, though not tremendously so.
Meanwhile, the original Story of Ferdinand continues to flourish. It actually outsold Gone with the Wind in 1938, the same year that Disney released a charming, animated short version, which you can easily find on YouTube. The book has not been out of print in the 81 years since it was first published. As to this new release, it’s unlikely to have the same lifespan. Watching it, I smelled something, and it wasn’t flowers.