I think it’s difficult to be American and not have grown up with the Peanuts in some way.
For me, it was an inextricable part of growing up. Every winter, A Charlie Brown Christmas played on the TV, its smooth jazz becoming as much a part of the season as the massive malls full of Santa displays and the gray snowless streets (thanks to a lot of winters in Texas). My dad told his stories of starring in a stage play of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, Peanuts books lined our shelves and a Snoopy keychain was a constant fixture in my parents’ cars. And I know I can’t be alone in that history.
The Peanuts Movie, like many movies this year, has a long-term legacy that it has to live up to. So, does it live up to its legacy?
In short, yes. It’s a charming film with an absolutely beautiful animation style.
In long, the story keeps the structure of the old specials with just enough to blow it up to a feature film, even if not always successfully.
The Peanuts Movie follows a similar structure to any older Peanuts special. And in fact, storywise, very few things separate it from those specials. A new kid moves to town, a Little Red-Haired Girl with whom Charlie Brown (voiced by Noah Schnapp) becomes instantly enamored. But insecure about his place in the world and spurred on by Lucy’s (Hadley Belle Miller) admonishment of his attitude, Charlie Brown must find a way to impress the Little Red-Haired Girl and somehow become successful while still doing the right thing.
It’s a classic Peanuts story, but one told with a great deal of big screen relish. The reason there are so many Peanuts specials is because the limited animation made them easy and cheap to animate. The Peanuts Movie has a huge budget and it shows. It looks gorgeous, retaining the look of the comics and specials, but managing to feel new and fresh. The detail is exactly where it needs to be, and even the limited 2D animation (the use of which is most clearly seen in the characters’ eyes, which pop like comic strip drawings) really enhances the look. This film is an absolute visual treat and it’s clear how much fun the animators had.
Unfortunately, the story begins to show the limits of this big screen Peanuts take. The Charlie Brown-focused sections retain a classic quality. Resembling the comics more so than the specials, it’s broken up into a series of short narrative arcs that revolve around Charlie’s attempts to impress the Little Red-Haired Girl and find some success. The story is charming with a good family moral. There’s just not much substance, but no less than you would expect. It lives up to, but doesn’t exceed, expectations.
However, the Snoopy sections feel largely unnecessary. Perhaps because the Charlie Brown sections weren’t making a long enough runtime, perhaps because there was just a Snoopy vs the Red Baron movie that wasn’t fully coming together, but whatever it is, there are number of lengthy fantasy sequences where Snoopy battles his old enemy, the Red Baron.
These are largely superfluous. The first has charm and shows off the animation. It could have been a great little diversion, but there’s about four or five more of these, and they just end up feeling like steadily diminishing returns.
But honestly, for the kid watching, they’re going to be blown away. And that’s all that matters.
Because while I feel like this does live up to the old ones enough to be a solid special, it’s not for me. This beautifully animated film feels like an update of the property, and this stands the chance of bringing a new generation of kids into the same world of Peanuts I grew up in.
So my rating is based on my problems with the story and love of the animation with the film. But that’s not what matters. If you want to help a kid love these characters like you do, this is a perfect place to start.
GRADE: B-
A Few Words with Director Steve Martino and Writer Craig Schulz
I had the chance to sit down with director Steve Martino and writer Craig Schulz and ask them a couple questions about their creative process.Brandon Wagner: Where does the inspiration for this animation style come from, and what challenges did you encounter in building the animation?
Steve Martino: Well, the inspiration comes from the fact that we were working in computer animation, which I think offers us the possibility to bring this world to life on a big screen in a little bigger way than we’ve seen before. But I also know that fans have had a deep connection with these characters, and I didn’t want it to look like we had taken these characters and put them in a different place.
So, there was a tremendous amount of care taken by the animation team, by myself, [by] the designers to base the movement off of the styling of what we’ve seen with Bill Melendez and the original specials. I can tell you that comes from a very specific thing. Charles Schulz drew these characters, if you think about Charlie Brown or any of the other kids, basically in six positions with the head. And the characters do not look right if you draw them or present them in a different way. And so we made the commitment that we always want the characters to look on model, we want them to look like they’re from the comic strip. It’s an approach that is much more akin to working like a 2D animator with 3D objects.
It was technically more challenging. I will say that it was probably one of the most technically complex movies that we’ve ever made, to put something on the screen that looks so simple. The rigging team, the group of people that create the controls for animation, they had to create the ability to turn on multiple limbs and make fingers disappear so that the animators could have the control to shape each frame so that the characters looked on model and correct.
It was a commitment from every person on the team to do it and we held each other to that promise. It would have been a whole lot easier to do it a different way, but it would not have looked right.
BW: Tell me the process of building out the story, and creating the script.
Craig Schulz: You’re gonna have to talk to my son more about that than myself.
Firstly, the story was my idea. I was the one who had the idea and we pretty much divided the screenwriting into a couple sections. I took on the Charlie Brown section, and I took on most of the humor and most of the lines. To write the language of The Peanuts [Movie], in the way my dad did, is a tricky thing to do.
Bryan [Schulz, writer] and Neal [Cornelius Uliano, writer] were the structure guys. They came out of film school, they’ve sold scripts and they understood structure. Even though I was saying this is where I wanted to go from point A to point B, they were the ones who gave me the direction of creating the arcs and plots. [Bryan] would say, “Dad, you’ve got to create a scene based on this, this is where we need to go for this part of the movie.” He kinda guided me in that direction, and I would create those scenes.
For example, in the very early version, we had very little of the Little Red-Haired Girl; she would only speak at the very end. But what she does in that scene led to us asking a lot of questions, and we developed her role out from asking those questions.
SM: Well, structurally too, I think there was a wonderful thing in this that hearkens back a little bit to the Christmas special in style and structure in that the catalyst into the second act comes from Lucy, who is delivering the antithesis of the theme of the movie. She says “Charlie Brown, you need to be a winner.” And this sends him on a drive, on a mission, on a goal. And that’s very much like Lucy did in the Christmas special. I’ve always thought that the Christmas special is one of the most wonderfully structured and beautifully told stories.
