As an admitted cinephile (movie obsessed individual), I always gawk when people think they’re “too old” for animated movies. One quick re-watch of a 90's Disney movie (or a Miyazaki film, for the more initiated) will easily prove that animated movies are some of the best films in history. Therefore, I have no shame being the 21-year old tearing up in the theater for “Inside Out”, or rolling with laughter watching “The Lego Movie”. Because of this, I often get annoyed when people my age refer to animated movies as “kid’s movies”.
That being said, “The Peanuts Movie” is unashamedly a kid’s movie.
A reboot of Charles M. Schulz's iconic comic strip “Peanuts”, which blessed the world with the characters of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, “The Peanuts Movie” puts together some of the series' most popular stories in order to create a more-or-less linear plot about Charlie Brown attempting to win the affections of the “Little Red-Haired Girl.” As evidenced by the advertising for the film, the animation is simply gorgeous, and whether you are personally invested in the plot of the movie or not, the film never stops being fun to watch. In 2015, decades after the introduction of Pixar-style 3D animation, it truly is an achievement to create a fresh new style of animation. That’s exactly what is done here: a mixture of computer-generated figures and the iconic animation that we’re all used to seeing.
Thanks in part to a script by Craig and Bryan Schulz (Charles Schulz's son and grandson), our favorite characters haven’t changed at all in 65 years (the comic strip premiered in 1950). Everyone still has the personality traits that make them our respective favorites: Lucy is still the template for lovable haters everywhere, Sally’s personal philosophy is still one of unshakeable optimism, and (my personal favorite) Linus is still a 17thcentury poet in the body of a little boy. Of course, at the center of it all is everyone’s favorite everyman, Charlie Brown, trying to build enough confidence in himself to impress his new crush. One thing I caught immediately as an older person, that I hope young kids pick up on, is Charlie Brown’s inability to celebrate his accomplishments even after completing near-impossible tasks. The appeal of Charlie Brown, still after all these years, is that there is a piece of him in all of us, perhaps more than we’d like to acknowledge.
Besides the possible deep subtext, “The Peanuts Movie” knows its target demographic and plays all the right notes for them. The humor is kiddy without being crude, the situations are simple enough that children will understand them, and the “Red Baron” scenes add a dose of exciting action to the story. This storyline is perhaps the film’s only detractor. As we’ve seen in previous stories, Snoopy discovers a typewriter and begins writing stories imagining himself as a World War I pilot who faces the infamous Red Baron. Nearly every plot event that Charlie Brown faces is followed by a Red Baron interlude, which becomes tedious at times as it takes us out of the story just as we are getting invested. It’s not that the storyline isn’t interesting, it just appears too frequently, and we are unsure where our focus should belong.
Actual children play all of our favorite child characters, which is fun and refreshing (look it up—most of your favorite male characters are played by a grown woman), and the adults still “wahwahwah,” which is a joke that will never get old. Snoopy and Woodstock are both “played” by their original voice actor Bill Melendez through archival footage, due to his death in 2008. This is a beautiful piece of nostalgia, and all of the characters are cast so perfectly that you wouldn’t know the difference between the cast of this film and “A Charlie Brown Christmas”. The credits also reveal that Broadway star Kristen Chenoweth is INEXPLICABLY cast as Snoopy’s love interest, a dog named Fifi. One has to wonder why in the world a Tony-award winning soprano would be cast to make a couple of dog noises, though it is probably another piece of fun nostalgia since her Tony was won for playing Sally in the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”
In a bit of cross promotion, the film is preceded by a short involving Scrat, from “Ice Age”, and aliens. While I get that it’s the same animation company, I’m frankly shocked that Scrat still hasn’t caught that acorn, and it didn’t seem to entertain anyone in the very large audience I was sitting in.
Directed by Steve Martino, “The Peanuts Movie” does exactly what it’s supposed to do: be a cute hour and a half of fun for the kids, and an “Oh I remember that!” for the adults who are bringing them. You certainly won’t regret seeing it, but unless you’re taking a child, or you’re a Peanuts die-hard, you may be better off seeing a different film this weekend.
