Film
Ferdinand
- Director
- Carlos Saldanha
- Certificate
- U
- Running Time
- 106 mins
Carlos Saldanha, who’s best known for the Ice Age and Rio movies, directs a computer-animated adaptation of Munro Leaf’s 1936 children’s book, The Story of Ferdinand. This centres on the eponymous bull (voiced by John Cena), who’s something of a proto-hippy, preferring to sniff flowers rather than engage in testosterone-driven head-butting like his macho taurine chums. But when he’s carted off to face a matador in the ring in Madrid, our peacenik hero finds himself on, ahem, the horns of a dilemma.
Fascinating fact number one: the story was previously adapted by Disney for an animated short which won an Oscar back in 1938. Fascinating fact number two: the book was viewed as a dangerous political allegory in the febrile 1930s, being banned by Franco and burned by the Nazis on account of being “degenerate democratic propaganda”.
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