I saw “The Peanuts Movie” today. In direct contrast to yesterday’s write-up, I saw this film the very day that it came out. On a Friday. And there were only about twelve children in the theater with their parents. Nobody respects the classics anymore.
Let me start by saying that I’d forgotten that this film was brought to us by Blue Sky Studios, the same company that produces the long-running series “Ice Age.” That fact was smacked into my head before the film began, as there is a several minutes-long short featuring the squirrel Scratt. I recognize that I am no longer an eight year old, and that perhaps the humor of a squirrel partaking in comic shenanigans that were dated forty years ago is not intended to be the sort of humor that impacts me particularly, but impact me it certainly did not, and I found myself hoping desperately that this sort of lazy slapstick wouldn’t find its way into the main film. I’m afraid that it does, but it’s spaced out and, what with the style being so slap-bang and rushed, doesn’t last long when it does show up. It was annoying and jarring, but not enough to ruin the film by itself.
Something strange was up with the eyes of the characters sometimes. They usually went for a black dot, like the classic depictions, but occasionally some of them, especially Snoopy, had the more traditional wide, white eye with a black pupil, and watching eyes change shape like that in a medium that is far more restrictive and realistic-looking than 2D cartoony animation was startling.
The film pays homage to the classic “Peanuts” shorts in the same way that a copy machine pays homage to the original document, and with similar results. There were many moments recreated line-by-line from their original shorts, down to the word and gesture.
I debated with myself for a moment before I started typing this about whether I should begin with my complaints or my praise, and I thought I should get my complaints out of the way first. That’s all I’ve got. On to the good, then!
The film centers around everyone’s favorite blockhead, Charlie Brown, and the rest of the “Peanuts” gang. If you know the classic shorts, or the comic strip, you know the characters by name and archetype, and the film wastes no time in making sure you remember each character’s gimmick. Schroeder plays piano, Lucy is vain, arrogant, and overbearing, Sally is a flaky idiot, and so on. I apologize to anyone who considers Sally their favorite character, and am deeply sorry for how poor your taste in characters seems to be.
The exceptions to this rule of one-phrase characterization are Linus and Charlie Brown himself. Linus is childish and naive, but also far wiser than he has any right to be. He constantly appraises the world simultaneously through the eyes of a child, and the intellect of a well-versed scholar. If one were to assign Charlie Brown a quick description, the temptation would be to simply say “loser,” or “blockhead.” Indeed, the film tends to agree at the beginning, with Charlie’s bumbling failures taking center stage to everything else. The film is the introduction of a long-running but rarely-seen character in the strips, the otherwise unnamed “red-haired girl across the street.”Charlie Brown’s instant childlike adoration of the girl is his driving motivation for everything that he does for the rest of the film. She is endlessly fascinating to him, and a curiosity to the rest of the gang, and the film still manages to make it all the way through without revealing her name.
I should probably get on with technical comments now. The film is, as I said, animated in a more realistic style, but it keeps the artistic aesthetic from Schulz’s original strips, complete with the golf putter-feet and round heads. Overall, I liked the way it looked, though I think I would have enjoyed it more without the darkening tint that comes from the 3D glasses. By the by, you can skip the 3D. It adds very little, and I only chose it because it was my only option.
The music is a blend of pop songs and classic Peanuts. The former is a little off-putting for me, but was, judging by the loud comments from behind me, a hit with the children in the audience. The latter…well, it’s the music of the Peanuts. Anyone who’s ever watched a single short knows the music I mean, and it is hard to pin down why I love it so much, but I do.
The voice acting is, again, an attempt to recreate the style of the original. The only performer I recognized at first glance at the credits was the actress who played the squeaky-voiced female beagle in Snoopy’s daydreams – Kristin Chenoweth, which is incidentally a name I did have to look up in order to spell correctly. It’s a solid effort, with Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty being my favorite performances.
What the film does best, I think, is to highlight who Charlie Brown is. They say it a few times in the film, as it had been said several times in the shorts, and it’s still the case. “Good old Charlie Brown,” they say, and you really do get a sense of the good man Charlie is. It’s a wonderful digression from just making him the loser, or the depressive, or the blockhead. He is all of those things in turn, of course, but that’s not at the core of who he is. The film asks us to recognize greatness in a gesture, even if the greatness comes from an unusual source, or in an unusual way. There is a victory at the end of the film that I won’t spoil. It’s not a huge victory; it’s a small, personal triumph that means very little to anyone except the victor, but to that one soul, such a triumph means the very world. It’s a validation of who you are because what your heart reveals about you, and not because of your failures.
In the end, I can only say that the film is utterly charming. I’m a cynical person by nature, something which can be attested to by anyone who has tried to talk to me about “Where the Red Fern Grows.” I dislike being emotionally manipulated for manipulation’s sake. For all that… I’m not made of stone. There is a part fairly early on where each of the characters, having been identified by their trait, is pulled along the ice on their skates in a pattern, while the Peanuts theme plays, and I admit to having sat there with an enormous grin on my face.
It’s perhaps not the most graceful film, but by its very message, grace in action is far less important than grace in intention. You should definitely check this one out.