The Peanuts Movie

I finally got to see one of my most anticipated movies that I wanted to check out in theaters this year, “The Peanuts Movie,” which came out at the beginning of this month. So I will let all of you know what I thought about it in today's review.

Jesse Hassenger started his review out by saying, “The Peanuts Movie opens with a scene not dissimilar from the beginning of A Boy Named Charlie Brown, the feature that first brought Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip to the big screen back in 1969. In both movies, Charlie Brown sets out to fly a kite and fails; the chief difference is that in The Peanuts Movie, perhaps trying to mimic the appeal of the beloved Charlie Brown Christmas special, he’s flying his kite during the winter months. That’s the Peanuts adaptation challenge in a nutshell: There is both a wealth of material to pull from (baseball, football, camp, the Great Pumpkin, uncomfortable crushes, Snoopy’s fantasies), and the difficulty of picking and choosing which bits of lore to assemble into a larger narrative—especially considering how much has already been strip-mined by movies, specials, a stage musical, and the endlessly cycled strips themselves.” Every new adaptation is the softest of reboots.

This is true to “The Peanuts Movie” as well, even though this is upgraded in animation. Blue Sky, the company that has not came out with a single good animated movie (including the “Ice Ages” and “Rios”), creates a script that is co-written by Charles Schultz’s son and grandson in the brightest shades of modern computer animation, with the weakest additions of 3D touches. Hassenger mentions, “The kids’ faces do look more spherical, but not distractingly so, and the animators take care to render their facial expressions in Schulz-style lines rather than uncanny detail.” Even though it’s precisely more of a detailed cure than the characters have ever been given, it’s also kinder and more satisfying to look at than any of Blue Sky’s other features. It’s also a nice addition of Schultz’s style – despite, decided, no one needs to see Pig-Pen’s (AJ Teece) permanent cloud of dust delivered more brilliantly.

The higher production look pays off during an ongoing series of fantasy moments when Snoopy thinks of himself fighting the Red Baron, as he is supposed to do. Even though his imagination runs into enemy planes and an imaginary love interest dog named Fifi, voiced by singer Kristin Chenoweth, with archival stuff from the late Bill Melendez as both Snoopy and Woodstock, the World War I Flying Ace’s own plane stays, as it always has been, his red doghouse. Hassenger said, “The play-pretend combat, cleverly yoked to another familiar Snoopy routine from the comics, finally lives up to the dog’s dreams while drawing slapstick curlicues around the film’s margins. It’s the best aerial dogfight involving actual dogs since Up.” I would agree with him about that.

The big Snoopy scenes aren’t especially critical to the movie’s titular plot, which, just like the classic “Peanuts” movies, is not exactly strongly hurt. However, “The Peanuts Movie” does a better job joining together its episodes than many of the older films, forming itself around a series of simple school events: a standardized test, a talent show, a dance contest, and a book report. They’re all moments for Charlie Brown to try and prove himself to the new girl in class, the unnamed Little Red-Haired Girl, voiced by Francesca Angelucci Capaldi, who also voiced Frieda the “natural curly hair” girl. Hassenger described Charlie Brown in this movie as this, “This version of Charlie Brown is a touch generic—a bumbling, good-hearted dreamer without the richer, more philosophical veins of melancholy that run through some of Schulz’s best work.”

Hassenger goes on to say, “That simplification is reflected in the new movie’s attempt to honor the tradition of casting actual children as the characters’ voices. (This sounds obvious enough, but stars ranging from Rihanna to Taylor Swift have masqueraded as tweens in recent animation.)” Past “Peanuts” specials and movies used children that didn’t sound like they had studied or acted, and even though this is true in some of “The Peanuts Movie” casting – Linus (Alexander Garfin) and Lucy (Hadley Belle Miller) are for the most part spot-on – young Noah Schnapp (Tom Hanks’ son) gives Charlie Brown a more polished voice. Hassenger mentioned, “He speaks more clearly, but with a somewhat reduced vocabulary. Still, the movie does provide him with some hilariously Schulz-ish worries: When partnered with a girl for a school assignment, he frets about whether he’s ready for a relationship that might turn into a house, a mortgage, and escrow.”

Even without dialogue giving at the high difficulty points, this heart-warming movie mostly gets the tone of Schultz’s work and the voices of his characters. Lucy throws insults that sound like she is giving psychiatric help, Linus gives sensible advice, and when Charlie Brown gains local dishonor, his little sister Sally, voiced by Mariel Sheets, gives tours of their home and sells mementos, inaccurately kidding the strip’s history as a merchandising prize. Hassenger said, “Most of its flinches at Schulz’s bleakness are minor—little moments where the movie wants to assure its young audience that the kids onscreen aren’t that sad or upset. That includes the sweet but not especially Schulz-like ending; the filmmakers can’t find a way out of their story that doesn’t, to some degree, give in to narrative demands for validation. (In their defense, the more bittersweet ending of A Boy Named Charlie Brown, probably the best possible balance of big defeats and little victories, is already taken).” Without a doubt some huge Peanuts fans will shake. Hassenger is right when he says, “But this movie hasn’t been made exclusively for adult nostalgists, and is something of a gift for its newest, youngest potential fans.” A larger-budget “Peanuts” is still far more particular than almost anything they’ll see at a movie theater this year.

I’m not going to lie, after I saw this movie, I can’t stop feeling a sort of way I don’t think I have ever felt after seeing a movie. I never felt this way after watching any movie that is based on something I grew up with until I saw this and I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s because this movie leaves that good feeling that you feel when you watch one of their adaptations. It’s very funny and has some sad moments where you want our protagonists to be alright, but everything is fine in the end. If you haven’t seen this, go and see it if it’s still playing in a theater near you.

Thank you for joining in on my review today, stay tuned until December to see what we have in store to finish the year out.