Ferdinand the Anthophile, the Fighting Bull, and the Messiah: An Examination of The Story of Ferdinand and its Adaptations

This paper is an examination of the story of Ferdinand, the Spanish bull who loves flowers and never fights, and two of its retellings. This research, due to the change of genre and medium of the retellings, should be located in the domain of adaptation studies. The Story of Ferdinand was a picturebook written for the child audience by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson in 1936. Ernest Hemingway wrote a short story titled “The Faithfull Bull” in 1951 and parodied Leaf’s Ferdinand. The story of the peaceful bull was adapted into an animation in 2017, directed by Carlos Saldanha. In this research, the writers are going to compare and contrast the three works through textual analysis. Then the differences between them would be analysed to find the HOW and WHY of the changes. Apart from textual explication, contextual analysis would also be used to indicate that the Spanish civil war was the historical context informing the characterization of Leaf’s and Hemingway’s bulls. While Leaf endorses idyllic innocence in the face of violence, Hemingway ennobles the fighting spirit. The animation tends to criticize allegorically a homogenizing system, and celebrate otherness which is of sociological significance in the world today.