The Peanuts Movie

Cafe Society
21

Well, they completely ignored canon! Linus is a grade younger, and Miss Othmar is now Mrs Something and is married, and was only Linus’ teacher, not the rest. And the existential angst of CB is essential to the mytharc. Chuck cannot succeed! Geeze! Pay attention to the source material!

Ah, who am I kidding? I just saw it yesterday and I loved it! (I am a nostalgic adult.) We watched It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown on Friday. First time I’d seen that in 40 years. It was…not as well made.

I thought the animation was great, the little touches and breaks into “classic” style were well done. I love the parallels between Snoopy and Woodstock and Charlie and Snoopy. Both good friends who help each other.

To be fair, pretty much every TV special was a rehash. Most of the gags, starting with A Charlie Brown Christmas, were just pirated gags from the strip. Lucy’s whole sequence from the Psychiatric Help booth were taken from non-Christmas related strips. Great Pumpkin was a mix of various Halloween themed strips with the WWI flying ace shoehorned in.

TLRHG was shown in several of the later specials.

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Even though Linus is supposed to be younger than Charlie Brown, Lucy and the rest, he was depicted in the strip as being in the same classrooms as them. Maybe he was bumped up a grade because he’s so smart.

I’m a Peanuts fan from way back, but this movie was a snooze for me. I didn’t mind the updated CGI art. They stayed true to most of Schulz’s conventions. I appreciated that they never showed the bottom of Snoopy’s doghouse during all the aerial sequences. They never showed and we never heard actual voices of adults.

But…they violated the most important principle aspect of the comic. Charlie Brown won the appreciation and perhaps even the affection of the little red haired girl. Charlie Brown should never win. That undermines everything Schulz established in Peanuts.

If you want to see a real Peanuts movie, watch A Boy Named Charlie Brown.