A Masterpiece!

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

When I first saw this I automatically thought what is perhaps the most obvious, that Ferdinand the flower sniffing bull, was gay! But on subsequent viewings I don't think that anymore and I see now that it's something just a tad more meaningful than that. Ferdinand is a peace-loving bull who doesn't want to fight. He wants to merely sit back and enjoy life. He's not really all that campy, more sleepy and dopey. He's definitely a little effeminate, so somebody for whatever reason felt that a mighty bull couldn't be a pacifist without being some kind of sissy one way or the other. Shame. If you ask me, if you want to see a real gay Disney character go see the dragon in The Reluctant Dragon. That guy is out and PROUD! :::2::: I can't believe this is so old. 1938...it looks great! The quality of the animation was superb. My favourite part is when Ferdinand goes on his mad rampage throughout the meadow. Quite where the bee stung him to arouse such a reaction is one best left to the history books! I find his movements as he demolishes all in his path and scatters the other bulls like bowling pins to be quite powerful and exceptionally well done. I think the moral is probably the same as most Disney animations-be yourself! That it is perfectly fine to be different and like what you like! There's not terribly much to it, but it's very cute, funny, charming, and beautifully animated besides.

"Ferdinand" has the same lush art direction and is based on the same kind of sweet parable as a Silly Symphony, and was released while that series was still going (it would end on a high note with "The Ugly Duckling" in 1939), but it's something else altogether: the first of Disney's "storybook" cartoons. It is, in fact, based on a children's storybook, but that's not the point. The point is that there is spoken narration, and the drawings ILLUSTRATE the narration, much as they would illustrate the printed text in a picture book.So far as I know this is the first cartoon from ANY studio to attempt this kind of thing. It's not the best; narration and illustration are too independent of one another. I'm not saying that Disney should have used any of those old cartoon gimmicks - characters arguing with the narrator, etc. - which postmodernists delight in as though they weren't half obvious; such gimmicks would not, in a sincere work such as this, have worked. But words and pictures should partner each other in a subtle dance; each should know when to withdraw and place the narrative burden upon the other. I can't put it more precisely than this; but watch two "storybook" cartoons that Disney produced later - "Lambert the Sheepish Lion" from 1951, "Pigs is Pigs" from 1954 - to see the dance perfected, resulting in an animated storytelling sessions that FLOW, from beginning to end.To be fair, unqualified successes like these are rare. Most of Disney's later "storybook" cartoons also get it wrong, some of them are dreadful, and not a single one apart from the two I've named can match the charm of the first.

Disney has had a reputation (in large part, justifiably so) for taking literary works and making them overly cute, thereby not doing justice to the source (i.e., Bambi), but here do a wonderful job of bringing Ferdinand off the printed page and into glorious, moving color! This is one of the best shorts Disney ever did and took the Oscar for 1938, beating three other Disney shorts (including a Mickey Mouse) and a Paramount cartoon called Hunky and Spunky. With remarkable backgrounds and detail, even for a Disney cartoon, this really should be in-print. It does show on The Ink and Paint Club. Most joyously recommended!

A Walt Disney Cartoon Short.Young FERDINAND THE BULL wants nothing more than to sit under his favorite cork tree, just smelling the flowers. But he is chosen to fight in the great arena in Madrid, where only the bravest, fiercest bulls have a chance for glory...This splendid cartoon, based on Munro Leaf's 1936 classic paean to individualism, is one of Disney's finest. The original story has been left basically intact - no animated mice or ducks, no dancing and/or singing trees & flowers needed here. Robert Lawson's evocative black & white drawings come to life in beautiful color & motion. The animators did have a bit of sly fun: the banderilleros & picadors are caricatures of the artists; the matador is a spoof of Walt himself (he was not amused). Don Wilson, Jack Benny's decades-long announcer, is an inspired choice as narrator. The personality & character of Ferdinand has been a matter of speculation for years, but the truth of the matter is perhaps best left in the privacy of the bull field...