Snoopy and Char­lie Brown: The Peanuts Movie

What a delight this is. Blue Sky Stu­dios are the ani­ma­tion house famous for rak­ing in an unholy for­tune from their end­less pha­lanx of sick­en­ing­ly cute, wise-crack­ing crit­ters in fran­chis­es such as Ice Age and Rio. If we’re being hon­est, they always seemed like a out­fit who would fol­low rather than insti­gate cul­tur­al trends, sel­dom opt­ing to take risks with their ​“prod­uct”.

With their lat­est offer­ing, The Peanuts Movie, all that changes. The ani­mals here pos­sess human sen­tience, but they don’t talk. In fact, the irony of Charles M Schultz’s ​‘Peanuts’ com­ic strip, which first appeared in 1950, is that Snoopy (a bea­gle) and Wood­stock (a bird) are shown as being intel­lec­tu­al­ly and emo­tion­al­ly supe­ri­or to the bemused chil­dren in their imme­di­ate friend­ship cir­cle. In this film there’s mean­ing and humour behind the anthro­po­mor­phism, it’s not mere­ly at the ser­vice of pan­der­ing to the hearts and minds of impres­sion­able young view­ers. This is Blue Sky’s fresh­est, most inno­v­a­tive and soul­ful work to date.

The sto­ry fol­lows humanity’s crown prince of losers, Char­lie Brown, as he con­tin­ues in his efforts to nav­i­gate the social mine­field of pre-teen­dom, a task made dou­bly tax­ing due to the daz­zling red­head who’s just joined his class and mov­ing into the house across the street. Upon clamp­ing his pin-hole eyes on her, Char­lie has a new mis­sion in life – to make her like him. Ful­ly aware of his gen­er­al wretched­ness when it comes to impress­ing oth­ers, this is a gigan­tic task, requir­ing the help of his trusty mutt.

The style of the designs cleaves tight­ly to the icon­ic orig­i­nals while updat­ing them for mod­ern times. So the char­ac­ters’ facial fea­tures retain the stripped-back, dead­pan expres­sive­ness of the dots and lines used in the orig­i­nal strip, while their bod­ies and the world around them is in three dimen­sions. Far from being an uneasy fusion of styles, direc­tor Steve Mar­ti­no makes it work with seem­ing ease, chan­nel­ing the best of the comics while adding a new twist to jus­ti­fy its big-screen berth.

What’s most impres­sive about The Peanuts Movie is the fact that the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing it is akin to flick­ing through a fat com­pendi­um of ​‘Peanuts’ strips and enjoy­ing a col­lec­tion of anec­dotes and asides rather than one big adven­ture nar­ra­tive. But the sim­ple coup is how all these dis­cur­sive ele­ments effort­less­ly come togeth­er in the end, serv­ing up the sim­ple les­son that relent­less self-analy­sis will only keep you down in the dumps.