BEFORE: I'm doubling up today on animated films - this was always part of the plan, even before I was stuck at home, unable to get on the subway to go to work. This sheltering-at-home thing is a complete pain, but it at least gives me the opportunity to watch more movies if I want to. I figured the movies for kids are usually shorter, because of their reduced attention spans, why not turn that to my advantage? This is also the second of two films that was once part of last October's chain, the plan was to connect a few horror films that couldn't connect any other way, only then I found the other way. So let's clear "Leap!" and this one off the board today, OK?
Kate McKinnon carries over again from "Leap!" - at least, I think she does, it was honestly hard to get a valid list of credits for that movie. Why did everything about that production have to be so damn confusing?
THE PLOT: After Ferdinand, a bull with a big heart, is mistaken for a dangerous beast, he is captured and torn from his home. Determined to return to his family, he rallies a misfit team on the ultimate adventure.
AFTER: Hmm, this is better than "Leap!", that's for sure. But there are still some strange story choices made here - I'm going to try to be nice because I've got a friend working over at Blue Sky and she's credited as a story editor here, one of many, but still, I don't want to hurt her feelings.
First off, bullfighting? That's an odd choice for a kids movie - you know that the bulls always die, right? The matadors always win and every match always ends with a ritual stabbing and the death of the bulls. That's the sport. Secondly, why is bullfighting still a thing, in this day and age? This is set in Spain, and I know old traditions die hard, but come on, already, there's no place for this in the new millennium, who's with me?
To this film's credit, Ferdinand eventually figures out that the bulls never win, and to be sent to the ring is a death sentence - up until this point in the movie, the bulls were competing with each other for the privilege of being in the bullfight, because that's what bulls do, they fight. And then they just never come back. The alternative, if not selected for the bullfight, is to be sent to the "chophouse", so on some level, the bulls also know that they're potential food, "chophouse" being a relatively mild way of saying "slaughterhouse". Again, what is this doing in a movie for kids? OK, some kids are really hip and vegetarian and take stands against animal cruelty, but I'm thinking only a small percentage of them are that enlightened. Was this meant to be here to get more kids to come around to that way of thinking? Because it's all presented here so matter-of-factly that I can't tell.
I guess this is a metaphor for bullying, and I can't quite decide if that's ironic or not. Because young Ferdinand is on the smaller side, and he likes to smell flowers and not fight, so he and the other smaller bulls get bullied by the larger young bulls. Then after Ferdinand runs away from the ranch and spends time on a flower farm, he grows to be larger than the other bulls. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, bad because when he follows his new owners to the flower festival, he ends up causing so much destruction in the town (literally, a bull in a china shop becomes a disaster) that he's mistaken for a dangerous bull, which he isn't, and gets sent back to the ranch where he was born.
At first, he's still bullied by the bull that bullied him when he was a younger bull, but then all the bulls unite against the bigger bully, which is man. The champion matador comes to the ranch to pick the last bull he will face before he retires, and he also mistakes Ferdinand as the toughest bull, just because he's the biggest - he also catches him knocking the horn off of Valiente, the bully bull. Ferdinand manages to rescue Valiente and another bull, Guapo, from the "chophouse" before they all take off in a truck with Ferdinand's trainer (a "calming goat" who also happens to be a screaming goat, not sure how to resolve that one) and three hedgehog sidekicks who also helped him.
The bulls take a truck to a train (this whole chase sequence was super-confusing, plus I'd pretty much tuned out by that point) and most escape, but Ferdinand is re-captured and finally sent to the bullfighting ring to face that retiring matador. Instead of fighting back against the matador, Ferdinand becomes the first bull ever to survive the ring by offering only passive resistance. I approve of the solution, because fighting back against a bully shouldn't be seen as the answer, but in the real world being passive isn't usually going to work either, but I guess they could only bend the story points so far, and a proper resolution that would also be a workable anti-bullying solution didn't present itself.
If I'm being really nitpicky, I found some of the voices to be very similar, especially John Cena as Ferdinand and Jerrod Carmichael (as Paco, a farm dog). When those two characters spoke to each other, I couldn't distinguish the two voices, it sounded like someone having a conversation with himself. Someone should have noticed this during the recording process and asked one of them to change it up a little. But it seems like John Cena was a replacement for Adam Devine, so perhaps these characters sounded more distinct at one stage of production, then a casting change created this problem.
NITPICK POINT: I didn't quite get why the horses in Spain had German accents - I kind of understood why they danced, because I'm familiar with the famous Lipizzan (or Lipizzaner) horses, which is a breed that actually originated in Slovenia. A little research into history, however, tells me that the Lipizzans were first bred by the Habsburgs in the 16th century, a time when they ruled both Spain and Austria. They took Spanish Andalusian horses and cross-bred them with Arabian ones to create the new breed. The famous training ground for the horses still exists in Vienna, and it's called the Spanish Riding School. But I'm still scratching my head over this, it seems to me like these horses should be in Austria with Spanish accents, not in Spain with Austrian accents. Right?
Also starring the voices of John Cena (last seen in "Daddy's Home 2"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Happy Endings"), Peyton Manning, Anthony Anderson (last seen in "Grudge Match"), David Tennant (last heard in "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World"), Tim Nordquist, Lily Day, Jerrod Carmichael (last seen in "The Meddler"), Miguel Angel Silvestre, Gina Rodriguez (last heard in "Smallfoot"), Daveed Diggs (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw"), Gabriel Iglesias (last heard in "The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature"), Flula Borg (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Boris Kodjoe, Sally Phillips (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Jeremy Sisto (last seen in "Clueless"), Cindy Slattery (last heard in "Rio 2"), Raul Esparza, Colin H. Murphy, Jack Gore, Jet Jurgensmeyer, Nile Diaz, Julia Scarpa Saldanha.
RATING: 4 out of 10 Pitbull remixes
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