By Noel Vera
FIRST you have that scribbled line — halfway between a fluid streak and a crabbed scrawl. It’s an expressive line, able to describe a round head’s frustrated brow or a small beagle’s literary ambitions (“It was a dark and stormy night”), able to suggest a child’s despair over a grounded kite or a flying ace’s ongoing Walter Mitty-style battle with the Red Baron.
Charles M. Schulz’s graphic line, done with an Eastbrook 914 radio pen, managed to exploit its limitations to evoke a boy’s titanic struggles with life, a four-legged dreamer’s titanic struggles with imagination. Peanuts was the most minimalist of comic strips — basically four panels, a few characters, some dialogue balloons, and a punchline — that nevertheless sketched the outlines of a moody, strangely melancholic world all its own.
The “bigger-on-the-inside” quality of the strip didn’t quite translate to the small screen when making its video debut, the less-than-30-minute A Charlie Brown Christmas produced by Lee Mendelson and directed by Bill Melendez (with low-key jazzy ambiance provided by Vince Guaraldi). More solemn than sad, Schulz’s message of austerity (the true meaning of Christmas) nevertheless conspired with the show’s no-budget look to create what seemed like that rarity of rarities: a Yuletide entertainment whose sincerity was entirely its style. Critics and audiences were charmed; the show was a hit.
The movie adaptation A Boy Named Charlie Brown represented an even bigger challenge; the television set’s modest dimensions seemed better suited to the strip’s modest scale — won’t the bigger screen make the movie seem, well, empty? But Melendez and Mendelson put their faith in the truth of Schulz’s dialogue and the tone of Guaraldi’s piano score, often throwing large background watercolor art on the screen with the Schulz figures looking lost somewhere down below (as with the strip the movie turned its limitations into an advantage).
Snoopy Come Home alas lacked Guaraldi’s casually tinkling score, was afflicted with less-than-fresh gags (the “hallway full of doors” routine, for example, straight out of Scooby Doo) and a tearjerking story line. But sometimes — not always but sometimes — the movie managed to suggest the full pathos and despair of the strip with the simplest of images (“NO DOGS ALLOWED”). Of all the animated Peanuts productions video or big screen, this would be my favorite.
Steve Martino’s The Peanuts Movie with input from son and grandson Craig and Brian Schulz attempts to resurrect that delicate sensibility for a modern audience, foregoing the no-budget look for more modern 3-D animation. It’s a serious problem — how to appeal to younger audiences while trying to draw its aging core market? — that inspires a fairly clever solution: 3-D mannequins with Schulz’s inimitable scrawl scribbled all over, describing eyes, ears, expressions, the like. Most of the eye-popping production value is poured into Snoopy’s air-battle fantasies, with zooming panoramic views of the French landscape.
But the four-panel vignettes are still there: the failed attempts at kite-flying (in winter?), the psychiatric sessions (at a nickel a pop), the attempts at attaining popularity, or at least better treatment from other kids. Tying it all together (not that that’s essential, only that the filmmakers felt it essential) is Charlie Brown’s (Noah Schnapp) quest to win the attention of The Little Red-Haired Girl (Francesca Angelucci Capaldi)
All fairly elaborate, and going against the grain of the original strip. But think of it this way: where Melendez and Mendelson asked you to look beyond the paucity of their Saturday-morning animation and barebones production values at their works’ essence — story and character, from approximately waistline level — Martino presumably is asking you to look beyond the sleek digitized package (carefully scruffed to look more handmade) at his film’s essence; if — and this is a big if — you can, then the movie isn’t bad at all. At times Martino lifts the camera up high and you have a diorama view of a park or frozen lake with the entire Peanuts gang going at their random bits of business in all their color and detail, and you can’t help but be charmed: it’s like one of those tabletop model train sets complete with small town that you find in the downtown toy store or diner, a Mandelbrotian distillation of the larger world outside.
That is, until the end (skip the rest of the paragraph if you plan to see the movie!) when The Little Red-Haired Girl turns to face Charlie Brown (random thought: why does everyone except Peppermint Patty address Charlie Brown by his full name? Is it because we are familiar with him and perhaps even love him but we’re never his friend?) and explains to him the significance of his year-long quest to impress her. Here we are, at the end of a feature-length adaptation of a four-panel strip aimed at adults but not unfriendly to children, and we’re being instructed as if we had a learning disability. It’s frankly disenchanting, if not a little insulting, and does serious damage to the appeal of what should have been a nice little animated mood piece. Too bad.
MTRCB Rating: G
