Review: The Peanuts Movie

“A barber’s son from Minnesota just doesn’t say no to these kinds of things.”- Charles M. Schulz, when asked about his billion dollar merchandising empire

Charles M. Schulz is the best hack who has ever lived. A man for whom cartooning was a job first, a business second, a craft third, and an art form never. A man who plugged away, every single day for fifty years, producing four panels of content to try to sell newspapers. A man who willingly compromised everything about his comic strip, right from the very beginning – he hated the name (wanting to call it Good Old Charlie Brown) he hated the format (wanting it to be single panel gags) hated the size (it was originally designed to be four identical squares specifically so newspaper editors could use it to fill up space anywhere within the newspaper, not just on the comics page, so each panel needed to be instantly readable at postage stamp size.) But he compromised, again and again and again, to get his work in print, to earn himself a living.

There is something beautiful about that.

The fact that what he was producing was one of the towering achievements in twentieth century American art is almost beside the point. To Schulz, at least consciously, Charlie Brown’s constant failure and misery were not grand philosophical statements about the essential existential nature of the human condition. They were reliable ways to produce jokes on a daily schedule that could charitably be described as “brutal and punishing.”

All of this I know.

I am aware of the mercenary nature of Peanuts merchandise. I know of all the television commercials, the underpants, the McDonalds tie-ins. I am aware that all of this was carefully overseen by Charles M. Schulz himself.

I also know that Schulz wrote the scripts to some questionable-to-terrible television specials. That 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas is one of the greatest half hours of television ever produced, but that by the late-seventies, early-eighties, stuff had gone seriously off the rails.

I am aware of It’s Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown! I know how low Schulz could sink.

All of this is to acknowledge that 2015’s The Peanuts Movie is nowhere near the bottom of the Peanuts barrel. It is very obvious that everybody at Blue Sky Studios, from director Steve Martino, to the three credited writers (two of whom are Schulz’s son and grandson), all the way on down to the lowliest production assistant, has a genuine love and admiration for Schulz’s material, and are trying their absolute hardest to treat it with all the respect in the world.

None of which stops the film from being absolutely terrible.

The plot of The Peanuts Movie is roughly as simple as the plot of any Schulz-penned special or movie. Charlie Brown (here turned from clinically depressed child to lovable klutz, like he’s the female lead in a bad romantic comedy,) sees the Little Red Haired Girl, who is new to the neighbourhood. Chuck is instantly smitten, and spends the entire year over which the film is set trying to make himself seem impressive, to win her heart. His own good nature keeps getting in the way, as each time he tries to impress he is presented with some poxy moral challenge, where he invariably does the right thing without even thinking about it. The film climaxes with Charlie Brown successfully flying a kite (gross,) and then the Little Red Haired Girl, music swelling, telling Charlie Brown that she likes him for his kindness and honesty, and doesn’t want or need anyone less of a loser (double gross.) Inexplicably, everyone has gathered around to watch this emotionally intimate moment like a bunch of tiny creeps. They erupt in cheers, before a dance party to a deeply embarrassing Meghan Trainor song plays over the end credits.

Now, the story of good old Charlie Brown’s infatuation with the Little Red Haired Girl has a chequered history under Charles M. Schulz. At its best, the Little Red Haired Girl represents the inherent pointlessness and futility of nurturing crushes on people you are well aware you are never going to talk to, taking it to abstracted and absurd extremes by literally never depicting her on-panel. At its worst, you get total garbage like the 1977 television special It’s Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown, which not only breaks convention by actually depicting the Little Red Haired Girl onscreen, but does so in the most bland, boring, asinine manner, completely removing any sort of mystery or ambiguity. Taking an inherently unknowable force (the nature of weird, confusing, baffling prepubescent desire) and giving it the most generic face possible.

Watching It’s Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown as a child was intensely frustrating. “Stop it!” I wanted to shout at my VCR copy I purchased as an ex-rental from the local Blockbuster Video. “You’re ruining everything!”

“How could I possibly be invested in Charlie Brown’s longing for this tedious nothing? She had more personality as an idea than she does here, where they really do reduce her entire characterisation down to ‘Charlie Brown’s love interest.’ Previously I could believe that she had her own life, and desires, and mind, totally unrelated to Charlie Brown. I could assume that Charlie Brown himself is reducing her down to this abstract ideal, because treating her as a real person destroys the mystery for him, which is really what he’s attracted to. But now you’ve removed all of that, and replaced it with nothing of any worth!”

Of course, I was unable to articulate this as a child, who was just angry at a VHS tape for reasons that I could not state any more clearly than, “they broke the rules.”

But now I am older, and I can articulate it, and The Peanuts Movie does exactly the same thing that It’s Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown does. It turns the Little Red Haired Girl into a physical presence, without managing to turn her into a character.

The film tries to get cute with it all – it spends the first hour or so hiding or obscuring the Little Red Haired Girl’s face, as if she was the neighbour on Home Improvement. But even as it is playing these little games you still constantly and irritatingly get enough glimpses of her so that you know exactly what she looks like, even before the tedious wet-fart “reveal” at the end, where she turns around and looks… exactly as you had assumed she looked the entire film.

It is awful.

The film has its positives. There is a real deliberate attempt to not update the material – the kids all use phones with chords, Lucy is still only charging 5c for her psychiatric help, Charlie Brown borrows a physical copy of War and Peace from the library, without downloading it to his smartphone or whatever. The animation looks pretty good. If you have to CGI the Peanuts gang (which you don’t, but whatever,) then making it look about halfway between stop motion animation and Schulz’s original squiggly lines is a better way to do it than most.

But even the animation has its problems. Each individual frame looks nice, with a very deliberate hand-made quality to the characters, interestingly contrasted to the hyper-realised backgrounds. But the actual character animation is too… busy. As if the simplified body shapes made the animators nervous, so the characters are always doing something just a touch broad, best exemplified by the scene in which Charlie Brown shakes his rear end directly at the camera. It saps the film of any potential subtlety.

The film does get the Snoopy stuff right, though. He’s exactly as infuriating as always.