“Peanuts” Works For Me
As the new trailer for Snoopy & Charlie Brown: A Peanuts Movie by Blue Sky Studios is released, Skwigly’s Dennis Sisterson takes a nostalgic look back at the memories the trailer has provoked
One balmy evening in Rimini in 1976, while on holiday with my family and looking for something to read in the shops near the hotel, I found a shelf full of paperbacks, all of which had ‘Charlie Brown’ or ‘Snoopy’ in the title. The characters were vaguely familiar – I must have seen them in British newspapers – but we hadn’t been properly introduced, so to speak. The first strip in one of these books showed a little girl (Lucy, of course) asking Charlie Brown, as he laboured over a woodwork project, how the new birdhouse was going. “Well,” he replied, “I’m a lousy carpenter – I can’t nail straight, I can’t saw straight, and I always split the wood. So all things considered, it’s coming along ok.”
My ten-year-old self recognised a kindred spirit, and I collected all those books over the next few years and read them till I knew them by heart. Although much of the humour eluded me, either because of its American frame of reference – often, even then, addressing people and events of up to twenty years before – or its adult sensibility, that somehow made it more interesting. I was intrigued by this world of American kids who played league baseball, went to summer camp, and were often surprisingly well versed in philosophy, theology and classical music.
The two most compelling things about it, of course, were Snoopy, whose bizarre fantasy life blended so neatly with his reality that it wasn’t always easy to tell, as a reader, where one ended and the other began – and Charlie Brown, who, despite the frequent setbacks that seemed to form the tapestry of his life, was never quite defeated by it… because, as he reflected at the end of one strip, “where do you go to give up?”
In these days when it seems every animated film insists on telling us all how wonderful and special we are and how we must therefore follow our dreams, it’s not surprising that Peanuts, which, through Charlie Brown, confronts the uncomfortable truth that for most of us that just isn’t so, that we have to live with that and soldier on regardless, has taken a back seat in recent years, even allowing for its creator’s passing.
This melancholy but oddly comforting philosophy is at the core of Peanuts, so I was nervous about watching the trailer that was released today by Blue Sky Movies and 20th Century Fox, wary not only that Schulz’s minimal style would be turned into some slick, Dreamworks-style roller coaster ride in which Charlie Brown and the gang go on some action-packed adventure full of vertigo-inducing camerawork, make lame pop-culture references, sing about how we’re special and must follow our dreams, and, worst of all, make THAT face.
I wasn’t encouraged by the still that recently started appearing online. Snoopy’s inky-pen features seemed to sit uncomfortably on top of his slickly-rendered CGI fur.
The trailer itself, though, was far more encouraging. The combination of CGI, comic-strip iconography like whizz lines and an animation style reminiscent of the TV specials from the 60s and 70s actually works very well, provides a refreshing change from the highly-polished style that has become routine, and above all gives a sense that these are actually the same characters – the real characters, so to speak, not some re-imagining by a committee that has done all the homework but failed to tap into the soul. The icing on the cake was the voices, that closely echo the Melendez films, and the iconic Vince Guaraldi music – also very welcome in an industry so often determined to fix what isn’t broke.
And the 2001-style intro may be a tired reference but it’s an apt one… are we going to see some awe-inspiring space epic? No – it’s just Charlie Brown. But that’s fine.
Snoopy & Charlie Brown: A Peanuts Movie is released in the UK in 2015