The plot: Fighting bull Ferdinand (John Cena) does not want
to fight. Having escaped the ranch Casa Del Toro as a calf, and growing up on
Nina (Lily Day) and Juan (Juanes)’s flower farm, he would much rather spend his
days smelling the roses. However, when a day out on the town goes wrong and he
finds himself back at the Casa Del Toro, he is forced to confront what society
has deemed as his only purpose. As the calming goat Lupe (Kate McKinnon) and
the other bulls Valiente (Bobby Cannavale), Bones (Anthony Anderson), Guapo
(Peyton Manning), Machina (Tim Nordquist) and Angus (David Tennant) question
why a bull wouldn’t want to fight a matador, Ferdinand plans to escape and,
hopefully, spare himself and the others from a terrible fate.
As much as I am really starting to dread films involving
John Cena nowadays (mainly because people still
think just yelling “IT’S JOHN CENA!” whenever he shows up is a fresh joke), his
performance here is actually pretty good. He ends up getting overtaken by his
supporting cast, admittedly, but when he’s given a chance to shine, he brings
that iconic charisma to a character that is worth sympathising with. Cannavale
as the alpha-bull Valiente works alright, even if it pales in comparison to his last role in a film arguably made for kids. Tennant gets to trot out his native
Scottish accent as Angus, and that is literally all the character he has, Anderson
is energetic without being too
annoying, and Peyton Manning kind of falls through the cracks. Makes sense,
considering the man is not an actor.
Gina Rodriguez, Daveed Diggs and Gabriel Iglesias do alright
as a trio of hedgehogs, even if Iglesias is reduced to mostly food jokes for
his character, and Flula Bord, Boris Kodjoe and Sally Phillips as a trio of
German horses… aside from that being a statement that now exists in the
universe, they are incredibly abrasive in their snootiness without really being
funny. I’d call them flat-out annoying, except there’s still someone here who
is even worse: Kate McKinnon. I can’t remember wanting so badly for a single
character to shut the hell up before, but her Kristen Wiig-isms makes for a
rather unwelcome presence. Considering she’s one of the main supporting
characters, that is in no way a good thing.
We’re dealing with Blue Sky Studios animation, and while
it’s nowhere near the worst I’ve seen from them, it’s also really
underwhelming. The texture quality makes it look like every human and animal
came out of a plastic mould, as if they were focusing solely on how to make
toys out them after the fact. It’s all too shiny and rounded to work right,
which is surprising given how these people clearly know how to animate hair,
fur and even dirt while making it look distinct. The designs for the characters
is decent enough with the animals, but the humans in this thing are pretty
freakish. It goes for exaggerated proportions, with inhumanly long legs
underneath tiny-ass torsos, but their animation doesn’t make that decision seem
fitting. When everyone walks around like they have regular human proportions,
and yet they look like they’re late for their Hotel Transylvania 3 audition,
it’s a form of disconnect that makes this film end up looking cheaper than it
probably is.
Of course, none of the visuals here are nearly as
distracting as this film’s writing. Ignoring how irritating some of these
performances are to begin with, their dialogue in no way helps the situation
because of how dated the jokes are. How dated? Try “I’ve fallen and I can’t get
up” levels of dated. Bloody hell, that one-liner was old before I was even
born, so you can imagine how well it turns out now in 20-goddamn-17. There’s
also a few instances of 90’s-style “let’s try and make the characters sound kewl” lines that feel like they date
themselves as they’re being spoken; even the interesting characters fall to
this at certain points. As if all this wasn’t bad enough, when the writing
tries for something other than
‘annoying = funny’, most of the dialogue just involves putting down the main
character. I know that that’s part of the narrative, showing how much they
don’t believe or even understand Ferdinand’s intentions, but it gets driven
into the ground so much that it starts becoming mean-spirited for its own sake. And
to top it all off, all of this collectively feels like the film is trying to
stall for time, blabbing about whatever could be construed as interesting to
fill out the running time.
Not that the film needs to do that, though, and this is
where Cena’s performance and character starts to bring some real good to the
production. The film’s story, when it can be bothered to stick to it, is about
an animal bred for fighting who does not want to fight. It’s a parable about
pacifism, one that’s made strong by how surprisingly dark the consequences are.
I never thought I’d see a family film with a scene set in a literal
slaughterhouse, but that’s how willing this film is to admit that how stacked
the odds are against Ferdinand and the other bulls. When we see him try and preach
his non-violent ways, the negative responses he gets are quite accurate to
real-world attitudes. Pacifism nowadays is interchangeable with cowardice, and
no matter where your allegiances lie, you’re not going to find a lot of support
for it. Either you’ll try and be convinced that empathy and
compassion are signs of weakness, or you’ll be told that freely punching people
in the face is an entirely rational thing to do.
By acknowledging the dark
possibilities of the story and
showing an understanding of both the support and outcry over them, Ferdinand’s
philosophy turns into something that is rather commendable. As someone who has
a rather violent past behind him and who finds advocating for pacifism to be an
uphill struggle, seeing a family film of all things give this kind of
intelligent and poignant take on it is quite refreshing. I just wish that the film
knew that it had this much power behind it and used it to its fullest, instead
of what we end up getting overall.
All in all, I’m rather torn about this one. On one hand,
it’s frequently irritating, the pacing is sluggish and feels it’s just trying
to pass the running time more than anything else, and the animation is rather
pedestrian. On the other, when the film actually manages to focus on its lead
character, John Cena’s performance gels perfectly with the writing to show that
the peaceful way has a lot of strength in it. It benefits from being set around
the concept of bullfighting, which has its own activism behind it in terms of
getting it to stop, but even removed from its animalistic ties, this turns out
to be a rather touching look at what pacifism is capable of, all without
managing to belittle those willing to fight. As Ferdinand himself points out,
he’s not trying to make the others live life as he does; he just wants to them
live their own.
I basically have to weigh up the film’s first half, where it’s
at its most annoying, and the second half, where it’s at its most effective.
With how touchy I can get with more abrasive styles of humour, I’m sure that
not everyone will react as badly to it as I did, and the good I see here is
worth being experienced. I guess… yeah, I’d say check it out.
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