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Last night I watched another movie (this Easter weekend has been rainy in Spain...) and this time an animated one: "Ferdinand", from the "people who brought us" the Ice Age saga. It was funnier I thought it would be, maybe because I´m losing faith in 3-D animation, especially Pixar. The story was about a bull who lives on a farm with a girl and a farmer (her dad? her granddad? I already forgot it!) and has a very obviously gay personality that the plot tries to disguise as "sensitive". In the first scene, he is shown smelling and watering a flower, which is kind of (gay) lovely. Then a confusing event happens and he ends up in the place he came from, la "Casa del Toro" (I really lol´d here: "House of the Bull"), a farm for bulls raised to be taken to bull rings (and eventually killed publicly by bullfighters). The story ends well though.
I must specify that the movie, despite being American, happens in Spain, more concretely in Andalusia and then in Madrid. The character designs are caricaturesque and simple, and no realism seems to be intended, therefore the looks and action make the movie closer to Looney Tunes than to the Disney classics, which I think it´s ok. In the mid-part of the movie there is a low-point, but then it soon recovers its fast pacing. The last part, set in today´s Madrid, is shown very realistically and with attention to every detail, which is always something to thank because our country doesn´t appear in mainstream movies often, much less in animation.
Our friends arrive in Madrid, as if a group of bulls
and a goat could happily take a bus in this town...
I simply loved this part!
There was a previous version of this novel-based film as a Disney vintage short which I absolutely recommend to all cartoon fans. It was more character-based but equally funny. What amazed me of the new version the most was how there was no romantic interest at all for no character: the bulls show no interest in cows (they seem not to exist in their world...so the egg-chicken dilemma gets bigger here!), and there are only two female animal characters in this: a butch-sounding goat who pretends to be the bull´s trainer and is dubbed by *cough* Kate McKinnon *cough* (insert subtlety icon here).
SATC girls are back...and now all of them look like horses!
The other female is a mare part of a posh trio of utterly-flamboyant horses who are a bit embarrassing to watch, to be honest, because they bully the bulls (pun intended) and are probably the most unintentionally homophobic characters imagined in the XXI Millennium. They act, look and dance like an equine version of the Supremes (with touches of those beech gossip elephants from the original "Dumbo"). When they appeared, I suddenly had the impression that they had finally gone the animated route for the "Sex and the City" sequel and I was watching the three girls minus that Samantha witch...Anyway, the whole thing is fun and if you wanna see it as a big gay propaganda movie, there is nothing in the movie that contradicts that. I mean, there is even no mention to the girl´s mother as if she had been adopted by the old man...and his ex-husband?
More gay thingies: The matador prima donna, like most bullfighters, also looks quite gay, and is a real drama queen who drives a sports car. His name is "El Primero" ("the first one", big lol!) and is dubbed (also in English) by the swoonalicious Miguel Ángel Silvestre (of "Sense8" fame) who is clearly imitating the accent Antonio Banderas uses in real life. I forgot to say there is no character singing here, only the mildly dramatic, feel-good story and a good message for kids: be brave but be yourself above all. Not "find a prince and go marry him asap"...
Ferdinand, the original, the one and only.
I must specify that the movie, despite being American, happens in Spain, more concretely in Andalusia and then in Madrid. The character designs are caricaturesque and simple, and no realism seems to be intended, therefore the looks and action make the movie closer to Looney Tunes than to the Disney classics, which I think it´s ok. In the mid-part of the movie there is a low-point, but then it soon recovers its fast pacing. The last part, set in today´s Madrid, is shown very realistically and with attention to every detail, which is always something to thank because our country doesn´t appear in mainstream movies often, much less in animation.
Our friends arrive in Madrid, as if a group of bulls
and a goat could happily take a bus in this town...
I simply loved this part!
SATC girls are back...and now all of them look like horses!
The other female is a mare part of a posh trio of utterly-flamboyant horses who are a bit embarrassing to watch, to be honest, because they bully the bulls (pun intended) and are probably the most unintentionally homophobic characters imagined in the XXI Millennium. They act, look and dance like an equine version of the Supremes (with touches of those beech gossip elephants from the original "Dumbo"). When they appeared, I suddenly had the impression that they had finally gone the animated route for the "Sex and the City" sequel and I was watching the three girls minus that Samantha witch...Anyway, the whole thing is fun and if you wanna see it as a big gay propaganda movie, there is nothing in the movie that contradicts that. I mean, there is even no mention to the girl´s mother as if she had been adopted by the old man...and his ex-husband?
More gay thingies: The matador prima donna, like most bullfighters, also looks quite gay, and is a real drama queen who drives a sports car. His name is "El Primero" ("the first one", big lol!) and is dubbed (also in English) by the swoonalicious Miguel Ángel Silvestre (of "Sense8" fame) who is clearly imitating the accent Antonio Banderas uses in real life. I forgot to say there is no character singing here, only the mildly dramatic, feel-good story and a good message for kids: be brave but be yourself above all. Not "find a prince and go marry him asap"...
Ferdinand, the original, the one and only.
