He is forced into the bullfighting arena in Madrid, however, when he has the unfortunate luck of sitting on a bumblebee in front of a group of men who mistake his pain for ferocity. The story introduces a young bull who, unlike his peers, prefers to sit “just quietly and smell the flowers” rather than to fight. The unlikely hero is a bull who appears to be free of concerns but is in reality responsible for effectively bearing the burden of the profound lessons Leaf and illustrator Lawson place upon him. The children’s book layers simple text with deep imagery to create a complex work which is open to a range of potential meanings and is valuable to children and adults universally. Just two years later, Disney released the film Ferdinand the Bull which won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject and has likewise been popular over its seventy year life. Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand was published in 1936 and has never gone out of print since.
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