In 1969, Charlie Brown and company made their cinematic debut in A Boy Named Charlie Brown. It was a solid hit, seemingly pointing the way for the franchise to move permanently to the big screen. 11 years and 3 disappointing movies later, the franchise said "aideu" to the silver screen. The team of Schulz, Melendez, and Mendelson would continue to produce TV specials until 2006, though they would start appearing increasingly intermittently after the mid-1980s. Schulz would die in 2000 and Melendez in 2008, and after the one-off special Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown from a new production team proved to be a critical and commercial disappointment in 2011, it seemed likely that the Peanuts franchise had finally reached the point where Snoopy and his doghouse would fly off into the sunset.
Of course, in the 21st century, there is no such thing as a retired IP, and even as the TV specials were coming to an end, negotiations were already underway to bring the Peanuts gang back to the big screen. In 2012, the movie was announced, with production being handled by Blue Sky Studios, the animation house behind the popular Ice Age series. The Peanuts Movie would be released in November 2015, shortly after the 65th anniversary of the strip and shortly before the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Like the prior Peanuts movies, this one would tell a larger story via a series of vignettes, though unlike the others, no one takes a trip in this one. The script, but Schulz's son Craig, his son Bryan, and collaborator Cornelius Uliano, revolves around Charlie Brown spending half the school year trying to impress the Little Red-Haired Girl, who is a recent arrival in their town. The film is structured around each of these attempts, with varrious asides focusing on Snoopy, who is writing his novel about the Red Baron and acting out the various scenarios he imagines.
I like this approach better than the elder Schulz's earlier screenplays, where the various side stories more often seemed to district from the primary storyline rather than enhance it. Here, the vignettes were part of the main story, and even though we knew that, for the sake of the story, they'd all end in failure for Charlie Brown, well, it is Charlie Brown.
This is the first time that the Peanuts gang has been rendered in 3D CGI, and it is very well done. To ape the style of the original, the film is only animated at 12 frames per second, rather than the usual 24. That gives the film a rather unique look, almost like stop-motion. Charlie Brown's imagination is animated the traditional way, providing a nice homage to the specials.
Thanks to the gap between projects, this is the only Peanuts outing for most of the cast. Providing the voice of Charlie Brown is Noah Schnapp, who was 11 when the film came out. After this, he joined the cast of a new sci-fi Netflix show, which would premiere the following July. He'll return as Will Byers when Stranger Things' sixth and final season premieres next year. Also going on to post-movie success is Alex Garfin, the voice of Linus, who played superson Jordan Kent on Superman and Lois, and Maddisyn Shipman, who voiced Violet, who would go on to be a regular on the Nickelodeon sitcom Game Shakers. Kristen Chenoweth, who won a Tony playing Sally in the 1998 Broadway revival of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, returns to the franchise to play Fifi, Snoopy's (imagined) love interest in his fantasy scenes fighting the Red Baron. Snoopy and Woodstock are voiced, one last time, by Bill Melendez, using the extensive archive of his bird and dog sounds.
If there is one thing about the movie I'm not crazy about, it is the almost relentless amount of nostalgia and callbacks. The movie opens to "Skating", which Vince Guaraldi composed for A Charlie Brown Christmas, and we also hear "Linus and Lucy" and "Christmastime is Here". It's probably not a good thing that those music clips are far more memorable than the movie's actual score, by Christophe Beck. Meanwhile, there is plenty of dialogue lifted directly from the specials, from "You sly dog!" to "Nickels, nickels, nickels!" Even Charlie Brown having to read War and Peace for a book report gets recalled. And, of course, the school dance sequence (as well as the closing credits) see the characters recreating the dancing from A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Still, these are relatively minor complaints. The Peanuts Movie succeeded in a way that the four earlier films weren't quite able to do, namely justify a 80-minute runtime. And, because there was a decent chance it might have been the last Peanuts project for a while, it ended with a triumphant Charlie Brown.
Of course, this wasn't the end. A French Peanuts series would premiere on Cartoon Network in 2016, followed by Snoopy in Space on Apple TV+ in 2019, of which Craig Schulz is a producer. The screenwriting team would come together again to write some of the various Apple specials of the last few years. While no new specials have been announced, the franchise continues with the recent Camp Snoopy series and an upcoming movie for the service.
The Peanuts Movie is not as good as the best of the specials, but it is highly entertaining. It took five tries, but Charlie Brown finally was able to conquer the big screen.
Next time: This is it for 2024, and perhaps the project as a whole. There are still plenty of documentaries, not to mention the various series, but I may take a bit of a break from the world of Peanuts. We'll find out next Memorial Day if Year 5 is indeed kicking off.
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