"The Peanuts Movie" Review

The Peanuts Movie is the comic strip, and that's just what it needed to be. For Peanuts as a property occupies one of the few truly unique places in literary history, a genuine look at childhood through a child's eyes, filtered through adult sensibilities. As opposed to many pieces of family entertainment, which operate on a sensory level, with blasts of color, motion, and light, Peanuts focuses on emotion. Whether it's Charlie Brown's melancholy, Lucy's bitterness, Linus' empathy, or Snoopy's zaniness, Charles Schulz took his characters seriously, even if they were dealing with small stuff - losing a kite in a tree, pretending to be an ace war pilot. As adults, I think we forget that a child processing their emotional understanding of the world is a legitimate act, and I think Schulz argues just because our experience gives us wider perspectives of understanding, we shouldn't belittle, trivialize, or patronize them. Thankfully, the movie keeps Schulz' spirit in mind, crafting a faithful homage to his vision - the kind of family entertainment we need.

The film focuses, as it always does, on Charlie Brown (played with surprising range and depth by Noah Schnapp; he also plays Tom Hanks' son in Bridge of Spies), a wishy-washy, goodhearted kid for whom nothing seems to go his way. He can't fly a kite, can't throw a pitch down the plate, and when he messes up, weathers the groans, eye rolls, and cries of "YOU BLOCKHEAD!" from the other kids. However, when a little red-headed girl moves in across the street, Charlie falls head over heels, and tries everything to make the best first impression.

Peanuts is laid-back, and more episodic than linear. As a result, the movie's rhythm varies, and can progress leisurely. Fans will be used to this; Peanuts has always, to me, resembled a lazy summer afternoon with my friends. I'm not sure how kids growing up on Hotel Transylvania, Despicable Me, and the Ice Age sequels will respond, but the film is definitely a change of pace.  

I own two Peanuts collections: Peanuts - A Golden Celebration and Peanuts Treasury. I read them nigh-religiously in my youth, so as a fan, I'm pleased to spot all the references to the comics. Fans will find a smorgasbord of Easter eggs; the screen is laden from top to bottom with nods to specific strips, creators and producers, and little secrets that give insight into the Peanuts universe (the sequel will probably split into two parts and make Charlie Brown into Hawkeye). My pleasure's not with the amount of references, however, but with how well they're integrated. There's a callback to the comics when Marcie tries to wake up Peppermint Patty in class; in the strips, the punchline ends in either Patty blurting out a wrong answer, Marcie inventing a ludicrous device to make it look like she's awake, or some witty banter with Marcie and Miss Othmar (here, she's played appropriately by jazz musician Trombone Shorty). The joke from the comic hits, and in a lesser adaptation, that would be the end of it, but it comes back at the end of the scene, becoming the catalyst for another plot point. These scenes showcase the great care Craig and Bryan Schulz (Charles Schulz's son and grandson, respectively) took in writing the script, to not only jam every comic into ninety minutes, but service the film first. 

Each voice actor nails their character perfectly (I give special shout-outs to Alexander Gaffin's Linus and Venus Schultheis' Peppermint Patty); it's not easy to deliver this kind of dialogue. The Peanuts kids aren't your regular kid characters. These are the kids that forgo lemonade stands to be psychiatrists, use Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace for a book report, and lean on brick walls for hours philosophizing about their existence and happiness. They also ride broomsticks like cowboys, go ice-skating, ride carnival rides, and trick or treat. Schulz wrote his characters like actual kids, curious enough to explore the adult world, but naive enough not to fully get it or be disillusioned by it.

And this is where I think these characters shine and what the film understands and gets wonderfully. Oscar Wilde, in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying, theorized that "Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life," and thus sparked a debate in what's better, characters that reflect how we are, or characters that we aspire to reflect. The genius of Charlie Brown is that he is both - as much insecure and prone to failure as he is brave and compassionate. Both sides of Wilde's coin are satisfied and can find comfort in Charlie, can empathize and sympathize with his plights and his hopes. He is both eternal pessimist and optimist, reflecting the entire gamut of our emotional understanding. Through his stories, we can hold up the mirror to ourselves, and through Schulz's spirits and his descendants' writing, find strength, hope, and the joys of life in its most irritating. After all, it's only through falling on our backs that we finally learn to kick the football.

In this regard, The Peanuts Movie is rare, a brief microcosm of not just society, but life. Through careful and skillful film making, the film finds ambition in familiarity, and in its wonderful balancing act of modernizing Peanuts and keeping the comic's identity alive, comes off just as timeless, just as unique, and just as important to us all.

Thank you all for reading; I'm the Man Without a Plan, signing off.