Ferdinand the Bull (Dick Rickard, 1938)

We have now seen how The Story of Ferdinand, superficially an innocent text, does in fact prove threatening and subversive to fascist Spain and Nazi Germany. An adequate reading done of this book today is a reading that can recover its lost critical meaning. By situating the story in its correct historical context and in juxtaposing the illustrations in the book with the actual images of the war, we discovered the anti fascist/pacifist undertones in the story validated through our secondary reader status as we were able to unveil the overreaching political anxieties and understand how the analysis of the images have shown why this book became the object of censorship and book burning, proving the text significant.
The Story of Ferdinand persists and endures over the years because in its images is a space in which the reader, be it an adult or child, can go back to again and again, finding something new, yet familiar, each time.