Ferdinand

Carlos Saldanha turns Munro Leaf’s 1936 book, a few hundred words in which almost nothing happens, into a chase picture. Ferdinand bolts from the Casa del Toro ranch as a calf, grows up in Nina’s flower fields, wrecks a square and a china shop in Ronda after a bee stings him, and is caught and hauled back. The last act is at Las Ventas in Madrid. Saldanha and production designer Tom Cardone went to southern Spain to photograph bullrings, vegetation, textiles and colour. The china shop sequence was animated before any music existed, so its timing had to work on picture alone, and the closing crowd of over two thousand came from a tool written inside Houdini. At the 90th Academy Awards it was nominated for Animated Feature Film and lost to Coco; Home, sung by Nick Jonas, took a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song. Disney’s 1938 short of the same story, Ferdinand the Bull, won Short Subjects (Cartoons) at the eleventh ceremony. A good fit if you want the book’s stillness traded for a stolen truck and a run to Madrid. Not for anyone expecting the film to argue with bullfighting, since the matador El Primero is one vain man and the question closes there.