“Ferdinand the Bull”

Look, I know Walt did occasional voicework for the studio. Everyone knows that. Mickey was still voiced by Walt at this point. And I grew up knowing that the matador was one of a handful of characters who was a caricature of Walt. But if I ever heard that Walt was also the voice of Ferdinand’s mother, I had blessedly managed to forget it. It’s deeply bizarre. He doesn’t get many lines, but he sounds like neither Walt nor Mickey. It may be his best vocal performance, and I hope I manage to forget it was him again.

Ferdinand is a bull calf living in Spain. Unlike the other bull calves in his field, he is not interested in butting heads and stomping and so forth. He wants to do is sit just quietly and smell the flowers. His mother shakes her head about it, but she lets him do as he pleases. One day, when Ferdinand is a full-grown bull, he is as usual sitting just quietly under the cork tree, smelling the flowers. Five men come to pick a bull for the corrida. The other bulls are excited by this and show off, but Ferdinand is not interested. Until he sits on a bee and is the most dramatic of them all. He is brought to the bull ring and is a great disappointment.

I’m on Ferdinand’s side, not just because sitting just quietly and smelling the flowers sounds like a pleasant way to spent your day. The fact is, those bulls are practicing to be killed. My grandparents saw a bullfight many, many years ago in Peru, and my grandmother hated it. She thought it was barbaric. The cartoon doesn’t really talk about that. There are bandarilleros and picadors and let’s not talk about what their job is or what the matador is supposed to do with that shiny sword of his.

The cartoon won the Oscar for Short Subject (Cartoon) in 1938, beating three other Disney shorts and a Fleischer one. I suspect anyone who had The Disney Channel as a child can say “sit just quietly and smell the flowers” in the tones of young Ferdinand. We can visualize that cork tree. (For those unaware, that’s not what a real cork tree looks like and real cork is an inner layer of the tree that can be peeled off several times.) It’s one of the most memorable cartoons of its day and about the only stand-alone cartoon, as it wasn’t a Silly Symphony and didn’t feature a character the studio would use again.

It did not need a feature-length computer-animated version. I mean, I haven’t seen it, I’ll admit, on the grounds of I don’t want to. But the short subject is a perfect length. It’s just enough time to develop Ferdinand and the situation. The animation is not Disney’s best, goodness knows, but it’s distinctive. All those caricatures of assorted animators, including director Ward Kimball bringing up the rear of the procession. What more could you possibly need?