What do we know about Charlie Brown? Only a few things. He’s a kid who never grew out of his baby hair. He’s got a sister named Sally, a best friend named Linus and a pseudo-rival-slash-girlfriend named Lucy. The four friends live in a suburban neighborhood, presumably in the Midwest, alongside a colorful range of other kids, including the Beethoven-obsessed Schroeder, the perpetually dirty Pig-Pen and the best athlete in town, Peppermint Patty. Oh, and Charlie Brown has Snoopy, his loyal beagle.
These aspects of Charlie Brown and the “Peanuts” gang have remained true and untouched for the better part of 50 years. Director Steve Martino (“Ice Age: Continental Drift”) is extremely careful not to get in the way of this, and he even goes so far as to incorporate quotes and scenes verbatim from the renowned cartoons. In this way, “The Peanuts Movie” is a fantastic continuation of the comic strip’s long-beloved values, a testament to its resounding popularity.
The question is, though: how does this movie contribute to the “Peanuts” saga? From what necessity does this story arise?
Well, we learn pretty quickly that Charlie Brown is a hopeless romantic. The Little Red-Haired Girl has just moved in across the street, and Charlie Brown sees it as an opportunity to finally start fresh with someone. He tries to win her heart in the school’s talent show; he writes a book report for her while she’s out of town, wooing her with flowers and trying to return her pink pencil along the way. But the course of true love never did run smooth, as Charlie Brown, aside from being a hopeless romantic, is also hopelessly accident-prone. Despite his best efforts, he just can’t beat his own tendency to screw up.
We learn, too, that Snoopy is a rather prolific novelist. After he finds an old typewriter in a dumpster outside the school, Snoopy begins writing an epic World War I-era love story. Most of the movie’s action scenes emerge from Snoopy’s jet-fueled rivalry with the Red Baron, a skilled pilot who has kidnapped Fifi, Snoopy’s love interest. A multi-part war story develops, in which Snoopy tries to win back the love of his life. The beautiful part about this storyline is its wordless entanglement of puppy love. The two dogs can’t talk, of course, but in Charles M. Schulz’s “Peanuts” world, that doesn’t matter.
These are the basic story points of a very G-rated “Peanuts Movie.” Vince Guaraldi’s legendary, and wholly American, score accompanies light-hearted ice-skating scenes and breezy walks through the park. Guaraldi’s subtle but upbeat music — “Skating” and “Linus and Lucy” mostly — is by now inseparable from the characters themselves. However, the film does throw in modern pop music like Flo Rida’s “That’s What I Like,” and it’s not a detriment so much as a distraction from the otherwise perfectly-framed “Peanuts” world.
Part of the reason why “The Peanuts Movie” works so well is that it feels suitably subdued in time. Telephones are still wired, Snoopy flashes in and out of the 1910s, the kids still wear galoshes and grades are posted on bulletin boards in the hallway. The animation, though certainly modern, is simple and linear, a conflation of two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes — an odd but endearing throwback to Schulz’s cartoons. Adults are never around, and if they are, they stay off camera and mutter gibberish to the children — the “wah-wah” voices still a perfect double-sided pun (are the kids simply not listening, or are the adults just sputtering totally insignificant things?) In either case, the absence of adults renders the “Peanuts” world warm, wacky and completely insecure. Without any of those elements, everything would unravel.
There’s a moment in the movie (borrowed from the Christmas special) that captures viewers’ interest from generation to generation. In the winter, Lucy sets up and operates her own five-cent Psychiatric Advice stand, which is a lovely play on the lemonade stand. Charlie Brown is, of course, Lucy’s first and most frequent customer. He tells her all about his anxiety, his growing fear of responsibility and bad luck with girls. Lucy listens intently like a good friend. And as she gives him advice (good advice, too) something about the whole exchange strikes us: these kids genuinely depend on one another for help. “The Peanuts Movie” and indeed the “Peanuts” empire teach us that only children really understand each other. And that’s where the nostalgia sets in.