Review of The Peanuts Movie (2015) by Jonathan B — 16 Apr 2018

Peanuts was, for me, the best of the long-running humorous cartoon strips. Even today, I love the deadpan nature and gentle exposing of human frailties that Schulz gave to the strip. I also loved the TV adaptations that bought underdog Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Sally, Linus and the gang to the small screen and seemed to be endlessly repeated.

I loved this comic creation so much that one of my aunties used to call me Charlie Brown and I named one of my own dogs Snoopy. With this in mind, I'd avoided watching this updated movie version for a long time as I didn't want my tender childhood memories tainted as so often happens with reboots and updates.

I need not have worried as with members of Schulz's own family very much at the helm of this project, it has been brought to the big screen with a respect and genuine love of the original both in spirit and realisation.

Even the voices sound like the earlier cartoons and the musical score, so integral to the mood, is very familiar. This is a very gentle and warm comedy where Charlie is full of self-doubt and embarrassment about his ability to make a good impression on the Little Red-Haired Girl.

There's all the usual Peanuts moments such as the uncooperative kites Charlie tries to get airborne, Lucy's psychiatrist stand, failure on the baseball pitch and Peppermint Patty falling asleep in class only waking to blurt out the wrong answer to a question.

There's also lots of Snoopy in squirmishes with his arch nemesis, The Red Baron. In fact, there is probably a little too much of this and it does feel a bit like padding at times. This is a gentle, kindly humour with no big gags and I am not sure how well it will resonate with modern kids who I suspect may find the action and plot a bit tame and the humour too impenetrable to hold their attention but as a nostalgia fix, I'd recommend any parent and grandparent to drag the kids along to see it.