The peanuts movie
SNOOPY AND CHARLIE BROWN: THE PEANUTS MOVIE Buzz gets an early look at what could be the family hit of the winter...
Are Snoopy and pals starring in this year’s Paddington?
The last Snoopy movie was so long ago we worried our Peanuts pals took the title – Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (And Don’t Come Back!!) – a little too literally. Bon Voyage was released in 1980, so it’s been 35 years since the pooch last went feature-length.
Thankfully, Charlie Brown and the gang are coming back, and in a big way. While creator Charles Schulz’s fans are die-hard, and terms like ‘CGI’ and ‘3D’ aren’t top of the list of descriptives they want associated with Lucy, Linus and the rest, fear not. Following Buzz’s sneak peek during our trip to Blue Sky Studios in Connecticut, the new home of Peanuts, we can tell any worriers to save their five cents at the psychiatric booth; the project is in safe hands.
We chatted with director Steve Martino ( Horton Hears A Who!, Ice Age: Continental Drift) about fan expectation. “It was probably the biggest motivator for myself and everyone else on this movie knowing how much these characters have been important to people around the world,” he says. “We wanted to try to honour what Charles Schultz gave us, because we’re fans first and foremost.”
Which isn’t to say Martino wasn’t prepared to change the formula in service to cinema. “Creating the movie in computer animation [ was a big risk],” he adds. “It wasn’t lost on me, watching videos of Charles Schulz, that the beauty of what he drew was in this pen-line. But I believed we could create an experience for an audience that was a little bigger, painting on a bigger canvas. I thought we had the opportunity to honour this world, and these characters, but yet present something that looks rich and big and worthy of seeing in the movie theatre.” SA
ETA | 21 December Snoopy And Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie opens later this year.