PEANUTS’ GALLERY
Snoopy and the gang bring on the nostalgia in The Peanuts Movie,
The Peanuts Movie (out of 4) Animated family comedy featuring the voices of Noah Schnapp (Charlie Brown), Alexander Garfin (Linus), Hadley Belle Miller (Lucy), Venus Schultheis (Peppermint Patty), Mariel Sheets (Sally), Noah Johnston (Schroeder), Bill Melendez (Snoopy/Woodstock). Directed by Steve Martino. At GTA theatres. 86 minutes. G
Snoopy’s imagination is as wild as ever, but thankfully the makers of The Peanuts Movietame any temptation to sully cherished memories.
It’s a big, wet dog kiss of an animated family film, hitting all the expected notes of the Charles Schultz comic strip and TV specials that generations have loved.
This isn’t the first widescreen Peanuts adaptation — that would be A Boy Named Charlie Brown back in 1969 — but it certainly feels like it, acting as if nothing has happened to Schultz’s vision of small-town America since the 1970s or thereabouts. The only concession to modernity is 3D viewing.
Good ol’ Charlie Brown, as neurotic as ever, is still trying to fly a kite, make friends and get the Little RedHaired Girl to notice him.
His dog, Snoopy, with avian sidekick Woodstock, acts like the Artful Dodger on the ground and a First World War flying ace in the skies of his dreams, fighting the Red Baron. Snoopy also chases romance, a poodle named Fifi.
Linus still has his blanket and homespun philosophy. Lucy has her temper and her psychiatrist’s stand. Peppermint Patty is still a tomboy and dynamo. The cast members all sound exactly like the voices recalled from TV specials that began in 1965 with A Charlie Brown Christmas — and Vince Guaraldi’s bouncy jazz theme from that show is woven throughout the film’s otherwise unremarkable soundtrack.
Director Steve Martino is faithful to the episodic nature of the strip and TV shows, down to the last detail: the telephone in Charlie Brown’s house is still a rotary-dial landline; Lucy’s psychiatric help still costs just five cents.
The screenplay penned by Schulz’s son Craig, grandson Bryson and coproducer Cornelius Uliano similarly chooses nostalgia over novelty. The story is hard-luck Charlie’s quest for love and friendship in the face of continuing obstacles, including a kite-eating tree and, yes, Lucy’s insistence on yanking away the football just as he’s trying to kick it.
Even when Charlie finally gets some respect and attention, perhaps for the wrong reason, he doubts the motives behind his new admirers: “Do they like me for who I am or for who they think I am?” (Wonder what he’d make of “friends” on Facebook?)
We do finally get to learn how Snoopy obtained the typewriter for his “Dark and Stormy Night” novel and why Charlie Brown’s shirts have that zigzag black strip (hint: yet another accident by that blockhead).
But The Peanuts Movie is for burnishing memories, not burning them.
And would you have it any other way? The smartphones, social media and global warming worries can all follow in subsequent chapters of this freshly hatched franchise, and you can bet those movies won’t have the same warm glow as this one.