11/10/2015 0 Comments 'The Peanuts Movie' ReviewEven if you're not a huge fan of Charles Schultz's Peanuts cartoons and comic strips, chances are you've definitely caught a glimpse of holiday specials like It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown or The Joy of a Peanuts Christmas. Charlie Brown and Snoopy are such classic characters that many of us have grown up with. So the big question is, does The Peanuts Movie do them justice?
The story follows good 'ol Charlie Brown (voiced by newcoming child actor Noah Schnapp) trying to impress the new girl in town, the "little red-haired girl," as she's called. The only problem is, as much as Charlie Brown keeps trying, nothing ever seems to go his way. So, in order to win her affection, Charlie Brown must embark on a personal journey to become a winner. This aspect of the plot has its ups and downs. For one, it works because you instantly relate to Charlie Brown and want to see him succeed. On the other hand, this has been the personality of the character for nearly 50 years: Charlie Brown has always been the hopeful optimist, the one who never stops trying, even though he almost never wins. It's never before been directly addressed, much less devoted to an entire plot, so it almost feels as though you're being beaten over the head with it. For years, the appeal of the character has been his simplicity; he tries, he fails, he gets back up again. There's not much more to it than that, so anything else just feels like overkill. But to attempt to compensate, there's a subplot involving Charlie Brown's beagle, Snoopy, piloting his imaginary dog house airplane in pursuit of his WWI nemesis, the Red Baron. It's about as silly as it sounds, and it doesn't add much to the overall story. These scenes are imaginatively animated, and ironically, I don't think they're supposed to be. In the older animated shorts, these instances still occurred, but didn't take up as big a portion of the runtime of the feature. And when they were there, they merely depicted Snoopy sitting atop his dog house, firing imaginary bullets. Sounds of gunfire and planes crashing would fill in the background, but it was still up to the audience's imagination to decide what was happening. We were right there with Snoopy imagining the action, and the Red Baron scenes this time around missed the mark on that. While on the topic of the animation, I enjoyed the computer-generated approach a lot more than I thought I would. One of my favorite aspects of the original Charles Schultz cartoons is the simplistic approach to the animation. Everything is hand-drawn and, honestly, rather cheap-looking (a huge part of its allure being the simplicity), but it's honest. There's no tricks, and what you see is exactly what you get, so I was slightly concerned about a CG Peanuts project. Fortunately, however, the style works because it's not filled with as much fast movement as most other recent animated features. It moves at the same mellow pace as the original cartoons, and the characters look exactly as they did before, just 3D except for hand-drawn. As silly as it sounds, my biggest concern about the animation change is that it would be part of an attempt to modernize Peanuts, but to my pleasant surprise, it still looks and feels like the old cartoons. Kids are playing outside (instead of on their phones), using libraries (instead of tablets), and the most "modern" aspect about it is a Meghan Trainor song on the soundtrack (which, if we're being honest, is no bad thing as far as I'm concerned). For the most part, it really does feel like a time capsule movie, and that's the best thing about The Peanuts Movie: for every mishandled story direction I didn't care for, I can forgive it for the classic Peanuts atmosphere that the story is wrapped in. At its barest essence, what makes Peanuts work is the characters, and they're all here, done to perfection. Not only are their personalities captured just right, but the voices are astoundingly spot-on. A particular highlight that must be mentioned is the inclusion of audio clips from deceased voice actor Bill Melendez, the voice of Snoopy and his bird companion, Woodstock, showing the respect the filmmakers had for the source material. Overall, The Peanuts Movie is a highly entertaining source for a new generation of youths to experience Charles Schultz's iconic characters for the first time. As for the older audience members who grew up with the Peanuts gang, there are a few story missteps (we don't need to be spoonfed Charlie Brown's trials, his optimism speaks says everything we need to know about him), but the characters' personalities, set in the evenly-paced Peanuts environments that fans have come to enjoy, important message about accepting your own qualitiess, and the overall dedication to the original comic strips and cartoons make up for the film's shortcomings. It's not perfect, but it's entertaining with its heart in the right place, and what it does right, it really does right. As a longtime Peanuts fan, I'm giving The Peanuts Movie three out of four stars.
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