So, I first learned there WAS a movie when some friends were talking about some magazine posting about how horrible it was that this pro-trans movie was coming out. I confess, I was distracted from that story line by the thought:
How do you make a whole movie out of a 30 page picture book?
Now, I LOVED the book as a child. I must have read it dozens of times. And I think my brother identified with the pacifist bull. But trans? Liking flowers and not wanting to fight makes a guy trans, now?
Anyhow, reading the wikipedia article, I’ve learned that this is not the first controversy the story has seen, although previously it was more taken to task for being pacifist. (Or fascist, weirdly enough.) And also that it made the best seller list shortly after it was published.
Anyhow, anyone seen the movie? Is it any good? Will the punning sidekick (I assume they will give him a side kick, despite his being kinda an introvert) completely ruin it for me?
Where I live, this was one of the stories pretty much every kid picks up at some point. It was okay, but it didn’t really do a lot for me. Honestly, I think it said a lot more about the importance of taking the time to truly know someone so you don’t allow one freak coincidence to cloud your judgment than anything about pacifism.
I don’t see anything particularly farfetched about turning this into a movie. Expand on the extremely basic premise, throw in plenty of comedic relief, and make the final confrontation in the arena truly epic. Judging from the trailers, it seems to be headed in exactly this direction. The fact that the story centers around a spectacle that’s loud, colorful, and grand, but also carries a whole lot of moral ambiguity that a skilled writer can send a powerful message about works in its favor. This will have a catharsis that a story about an obnoxious freeloader or grumpy hermit stealing Christmas presents out of spite never could. That’s my hope, anyway.
Yeah, it’s going to be cornier than Nebraska, but I can almost guarantee that I’ll see this at some point.
I saw a trailer for it before Coco. It looks so goddamned bad. So does the Peter Rabbit movie. There’s a subgenre of children’s movie, the “let’s buy the rights to a well-known children’s classic, make the protagonist the exact same smartass we’ve made every other protagonist, give him a jive-talking animal buddy, throw in some pop references and fart jokes, and rake in the cash!”
Normally I’m not too bummed if someone makes a shitty film treatment of a good book, but when it’s done to kids’ books, it risks leading a whole generation to think of the movie before they think of the book, and that’s a real shame.
I’ve seen it. I fell asleep for about 10 minutes. It wasn’t great-- it certainly wasn’t Coco– but it wasn’t horrible. I think that given that the target audience is probably pre-literate, it’s just fine, and for parents who are going to have to sit through it with their children, it’s not going to be their worst experience ever.
My 11-year-old likes to go to full-length cartoons, even ones that are meant for younger children, which he wouldn’t think of asking his friends to go to, so I’ve seen a few of them with him (a few theaters have absurd rules that people under 16 can’t see movies alone-- “cooler” movies, like the latest Star Wars, we can get someone’s 18-year-old sibling to go to with them).
He wasn’t crazy about Ferdinand, and he used to like the book when he was little. Honestly, I think I liked it more than he did, but that may be because his expectations were higher.
The really little kids in the theater seemed to be enjoying themselves well enough.
There were lots of elements introduced into the story that I don’t remember from the book, like the fact that bulls not picked to fight got taken to the butcher (it wasn’t terribly explicit, so a little kid would know what was happening right away).
It was your typical afternoon potboiler-- 2.5 stars out of 4. Watchable, not spectacular.
If you have a child under six, I’d say go. But don’t because it was a book you liked as a child, and want to see it come to life; you will be disappointed.
I thought that was the same story…because I used to get pissed off at the scene where the calf was dragged off and the little kid was chasing it down crying…(Its a personal experience thing… ) but it ended happy
I saw it, and was very disappointed. It just wasn’t good storytelling. There were a group of three snobby horses who had German accents for no reason, for example. I don’t know if I would have liked it better if I hadn’t just seen Pixar’s Coco, which was a nearly perfect film.