The Peanuts Movie

From the first frame of The Peanuts Movie (a big screen, computer-animated update of Charles M. Schulz's classic comic strip), nervous fans should feel relieved and reassured. Hearing the familiar strains of Vince Guaraldi’s themes from Schulz's beloved first animated holiday TV special—1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas—will calm any fears about the tone of this film.  Though the young characters are digitally rendered in 3D, they retain the distinctly two-dimensional qualities of Schulz's drawing and of the handmade animation of the original TV shows, commercials, specials, and features directed by Bill Meléndez. The new Peanuts kids don’t move like typical CGI characters; as per stylistic tradition for these little guys, they are always either facing forward or in direct profile (even when they turn their heads). The backgrounds, for the most part, are simple and devoid of realistic details. The setting could be anytime between 1950 and 1980 (we see no cellphones, no flatscreen TVs, no modern classroom layouts). Actual kids (rather than adult actors pretending to be children) make up the cast, and they all sound just right!.  Director Steve Martino (Horton Hears a Who!, Ice Age: Continental Drift) even uses the vocal improvisations Meléndez recorded for the non-speaking characters Snoopy and Woodstock; so they sound exactly as they do in our collective memory.  In short, everything is in place for a respectful, even reverential modernization of the much-loved series. But like so many other reboots that strive not to upset fans of the source material, there is just not enough here that’s either fresh or substantive to justify this film’s existence. 

The plot, such as it is, concerns perennial underdog Charlie Brown’s crush on the Little Red Haired Girl, and his attempts to get up the nerve to speak to her, or to accomplish something that will make him seem worthy in her eyes.  But there is no structure to this narrative. The film is basically a series of strung-together animated comic strips. That was true of the TV specials too, but earlier Peanuts movies, like the poignant Snoopy Come Home(1972) and the delightful Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977), had linear storylines that sustained their feature length running times.

At first the short, uncomplicated gags of The Peanuts Movie are charming, though often they are near duplicates of scenes from the Meléndez specials, and they jump from one to the next in too rushed a fashion. As the 88-minute movie drags on, the lack of a real through-line diminishes the initial appeal; things start to feel repetitive and directionless. The episodic events don’t build on each other, and could be rearranged into most any order. The picture ostensibly takes place from around early December to late June, but it also seems like it could all be happening over the course of a week or so.  And while the film maintains the critical component of sincerity—a hallmark of the TV specials—it lacks any of the bite found in Schulz's comics. There are also precious few of the traditional dialogue-free sequences where nothing but impossibly catchy jazz music underscores the amusing, silent-movie-like actions of the comical characters—even Snoopy’s Red Barron fantasies (of which there are too many) are continuously narrated and way too over produced.  Worse, there are none of the quiet moments that made the best of the TV specials so profound, like Linus van Pelt’s iconic scripture reading in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

The film is co-written and co-produced by Schulz's son and grandson, Craig and Bryan Schulz, and they certainly do not dishonor the legendary cartoonist or the integrity of the characters he created. But they haven’t done anything interesting. They’ve made a picture that you don’t hate, rather than one you like. There’s just no reason to watch The Peanuts Movie when you can go back and re-watch all the original specials and features.