Tim's Toons: Peanuts at the movies
Thursday, November 5, 2015 at 10:00PM Tim here. One of the all-time iconic snippets of American pop art returns to movie theaters this weekend: The Peanuts Movie from Blue Sky Studios (of the regrettably deathless Ice Age movies) converts Charles Schulz's comic strip characters to CGI, and the results have been getting surprisingly warm reviews (I haven't seen it yet, and am only now letting myself start to get really optimistic about it). In its honor, and in case it turns out to be bad, let's revisit the animated Peanuts films to have gone before. For even setting aside the God knows how many television specials, this is the fifth Peanuts feature, and while some of them have been weaker than others, there's not a true clinker in the bunch.
A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969)
The first in this case is pretty emphatically the best: based (like all of the movies and TV shorts, ultimately) on a couple of narrative arcs taken from the comic strip, A Boy Named Charlie Brown is the one that gets the essentials most perfectly. It's a story of perpetual loser Charlie Brown finding something he's genuinely terrific at, and coming up short in the end, anyway. The specific thing the film hinges on is a spelling bee, but that's almost beside the point; the film takes its time getting to that point, dwelling on Charlie Brown's keen awareness of his own shortcomings for a good third of the running time before the plot even announce itself in earnest.
It could be mopey, and it sure as hell sounds mopey, but A Boy Named Charlie Brown benefits from having the genuine anguish on display cut with the same sense of wry humor as the comic strip – as well it ought to, being written by Schulz himself (like the other features and basically every Peanuts animation prior to his death in 2000). And there's also the flights into broad comedy on the back of the Snoopy B-plot, to knock the rest of the edge off. It's perfectly bittersweet, funny enough that it's never hard to watch (it is, after all, for children), but deeply felt and never, never willing to join in the general mockery of Charlie Brown himself.
There's a distinct stiffness to the dated and even awful (but Oscar-nominated!) song score, which jangles badly against the terrific instrumental jazz score by Peanuts mainstay Vince Guaraldi, but that's really the worst thing to say against it. The animation is as ambitious as the series ever got, with shifts into an almost experimental mode, the child cast's voice acting is right on point with sharp frustration and melancholy, and the pragmatic moral – "The world didn't come to an end" – is one of the great moments in all of Peanuts.
Three more Peanuts classics below the jump
