Ferdinando il toro

Munro Leaf's original story comes to life with the pictures of Walt Disney and his artists, who give personality and life to the characters of Ferdinand, his fellow bulls, and the bullfighters.

Ferdinand himself is a sensitive soul, who has no desire to fight and just likes sitting under his favourite tree and smelling the flowers. The other bulls do nothing but fight and cause a racket, but when the bullfighters come looking for the fiercest bull for their show, guess who by some odd circumstance gets picked?

This little cartoon is a joy from start to finish, and Ferdinand is one of the cutest and funniest characters ever created in an animated short. Highly recommended!

"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.

Ferdinand the Bull is one of the most unflappable characters in all of cartoondom. He is a gentle soul, completely happy in his own skin. He inadvertently becomes a participant in a bull ring because he sat on a bee and went into a rage. One wonderful thing is that he never varied from his primary goal: to smell the flowers.

From a two-page trade-paper ad on November 2, 1938:

"WALT DISNEY'S Production of FERDINAND THE BULL. Never in all motion picture history have any but the most important feature attractions been given such nation-wide plugging!...Stories, articles, art and pictorial layouts, editorials and fashion announcements in magazines whose NET PAID CIRCULATIONS TOTAL 15, 542, 945! Look at the list already committed: LIFE...PHOTOPLAY...CUE...SCREEN GUIDE...VOGUE...MICKEY MOUSE MAGAZINE...LOOK...McCALLS...HARPER'S BAZAAR...STAGE...YOUNG America...MOVIE LIFE...LIBERTY...WOMAN'S DAY...MOVIE STORY...THEATRE ARTS...SCHOLASTIC...ROCKEFELLER CENTER WEEKLY.

Add to this a total of sixty-four licensees signed up for one hundred and two separate articles of merchandise. Big window displays everywhere. Big fashion parades in department stores. A PROMOTIONAL CAMPAIGN THAT CAN BE COMPARED ONLY WITH SNOW WHITE.'"

THANKSGIVING WEEK ATTRACTION AT LEADING FIRST RUNS EVERYWHERE.

NEXT Disney RELEASES * MERBABIES -Release Date, December 9 * MOTHER GOOSE GOES Hollywood - Release Date, December 23

Mr. Disney knew how to go to market.

This is one of my favorite stories from childhood and this Disney cartoon did a wonderful job of capturing the spirit of the classic Muro Leaf story. The 1939 Oscars were a particularly good year, with Disney receiving 4 of 5 nominations in the category of Best Cartoon and receiving the award for FERDINAND--beating out such Disney classics as THE BRAVE LITTLE TAILOR and GOOD SCOUTS.

The film is about a gentle bull in Spain who has no interest in fighting. Instead, he'd rather just sit and smell the flowers all day. However, when men come looking for fierce bulls for the bullfighting ring, they think Ferdinand is the meanest bull because he was just stung by a bee. What happens next you'll need to see for yourself.

There is a lot to like about this cartoon. The artwork, though not exactly in the style of the children's book, is pretty close and is among the better animated shorts Disney did in the era. If you compare the artwork, music and quality to fare from Fleischer, Warner Brothers and MGM at the same time, it is light-years ahead. The best cartoons at that time were clearly Disney--with MGM and Warner Brothers still making saccharine-sweet cartoons with second-rate animation until the 1940s (when these two studios became the best maker of cartoon shorts). This film just screams "quality" throughout and deserved the Oscar.

By the way, get a load of the Cork Tree! Ha!