Peanuts would never have been any good without the grief. When Charles Schulz’s daily comic strip debuted in 1950, it offered cute jokes about neighborhood kids and their dog, but as Schulz began to find his characters in the late ’50s and early ’60s—the depressed Charlie Brown, the hardened Lucy, the insecure Linus, the monomaniacal Snoopy—Peanuts developed an emotional depth that made it hilariously funny and revolutionized the art form. Last week The Peanuts Movie brought Schulz’s cast of characters back to the big screen for the first time in 35 years, adding the modern technology of 3-D animation to give the characters physical depth. But emotional depth is another matter—this is a G-rated movie, and in America we try to protect children from not only sex and violence but also unhappiness.
All of these traditions are honored in The Peanuts Movie, whose 3-D animation raises some interesting formal questions. The strip often transpired in a ruthlessly two-dimensional world—think of the line drives that would flatten Charlie Brown on the pitcher’s mound, or his futile runs at Lucy’s football, or even the characters conversing with their elbows propped on a long brick wall. Snoopy’s doghouse entered the strip at a three-quarter angle, but eventually Schulz took to rendering it as purely two-dimensional, with Snoopy impossibly stretched out along the edge of the roof. Steve Martino, director of The Peanuts Movie, gets some great 3-D effects when Snoopy is zooming around after the Red Baron (first on his house and then in a Sopwith Camel), but for the most part he respects the two-dimensional origins of the material. The characters are filled out somewhat—rather like those little plaster statues you can buy—but there’s minimal “inbetweening” (the intermediate drawings between poses), so the characters tend to rest at the same old angles.
Directed by Steve Martino
