I’ve encountered few movie titles as mean as Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!). I suppose it’s fitting as it was the last Peanuts feature film for thirty-five years, and maybe at the time Schulz, Melendez, and Mendelsohn realized it. Because it is a very odd beast. Like the previous movie, it isn’t derived from any storyline written for the comic strip -instead drawn from a visit Schulz had taken to a French chateau where he had formerly been stationed during the war. Another very different kind of setting for a Peanuts story -I don’t think Charlie Brown had ever left the country before- but one that is at least a little more interesting than Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown, if it does ultimately not really lead anywhere.
It starts off pretty great, with some atmospheric animation that shows a little how more technically skilled these movies had gotten, and in the ominous setting of a girl in a castle in the rain -it might not even be set contemporaneously. The status quo does set in though back home where a pair of French exchange students are welcomed to Charlie Brown’s class, and then Linus reveals that the counterpart exchange students are going to be himself and Charlie Brown -who was not even aware he was being volunteered for it. As it turns out the same thing took place at Peppermint Patty’s school (it’s often forgotten, but she, Marcie, and Franklin attend a different school than the rest of the gang), and she and Marcie are going to France as well. So the four kids, accompanied of course by Snoopy and Woodstock, depart the States for Europe. They have a stopover in England before crossing the Channel to France, Charlie Brown having received a letter inviting him to stay at the chateau of a mysterious pen-pal called Violette.
There are a couple very unusual things that stand out about the movie on its face. The first is that after the last movie tried to cram as many main characters as they could into the central premise, this one concentrates on just the six who go to Europe, leaving the likes of Sally, Schroeder, and most surprisingly Lucy, as mere cameos. And being such a critical part of Peanuts as Lucy is, it feels wrong to completely sideline her like this. The other thing that is perhaps more shocking is the presence of adults in this usually kids-only world. Adult characters are never seen and never speak in the strip. In the animated productions they will occasionally be alluded to, but the dialogue is famously replaced by a trombone sound. Here though they appear in full and speak clearly to the kids. I don’t know if this was a necessity of the premise or the animation but it is a little jarring, especially given adults don’t really fit against the aesthetic of Schulz’s art style for these kids.
The movie moves at a bit of an awkward pace. It spends a long, unnecessary amount of time in England (there was no reason the kids couldn’t have just flown to France directly), and it is purely to soak up a little British aesthetic and scenery, and one or two jokes largely from Snoopy. It’s rather late in the film by the time Charlie Brown, Linus, Snoopy, and Woodstock arrive at the chateau and find it locked and seemingly abandoned -in fact it’s much like the set of a Scooby-Doo episode. Peppermint Patty and Marcie meanwhile are nicely sequestered at the farm of a local boy Pierre, drawn with a distractingly large nose, and who in a nice little gag, Peppermint Patty perceives is in love with her but is very clearly enamoured with Marcie -they spend a lot of the movie afterwards holding hands. Marcie is the resident French speaker of the group, which has its uses as well as one other good joke where she argues in French with folks they get into car accidents with (Snoopy of course driving). These little bits feel in keeping with the style of the strip, just translated to this new context -another good example being Peppermint Patty and Charlie Brown in class together where she criticizes everything he does. Also how Snoopy, assigned to keep watch for the boys sleeping on the chateau grounds at night, goes off to a café instead and lives out a bit of his World War I soldier on shore leave fantasy.
And yet the movie still doesn’t really work, because it meanders towards a destination that is only sporadically built to. The mystery of who sent the letter to Charlie Brown and the general knowledge imparted about a mean baron owning the chateau and why Charlie Brown specifically was singled out, isn’t a priority for much of the movie as it distracts itself with little scenes and gags and bits of general tension mostly there for the animators to play around with the characters, Snoopy and Woodstock especially. It feels a touch slow for this, and there is even less of an overarching idea or theme for Charlie Brown or his audience than in the previous movie.
When it comes time for the movie’s climax, the eerie atmosphere doesn’t come to anything. Violette is indeed there, and her only reason for secrecy is the fact that her strict father disapproves of the boys -he knows they are on his property yet has not made any efforts to get rid of them, it’s very odd. Violette’s interest in Charlie Brown and her invitation stems from a bit of family history. Charlie Brown’s grandfather served in the First World War and spent time at the Chateau during this period, helping the family out and implicitly having a brief romance with Violette’s grandmother. She later learned about Charlie Brown from a friend’s visit to the States when he happened to get his hair cut by Charlie Brown’s father. It’s Linus who finds out about this first, when he follows and confronts Violette in the chateau. A mishap leads to a fire that eventually Charlie Brown and Snoopy, along with Pierre, manage to put out. The story tying into Charlie Brown’s family history is cute, but doesn’t drum up much drama, and the action of the firefight feels like small potatoes too. But after this the plot is basically over and the kids head home in spite of only being in France for about a week.
This last act is strangely slow and hasty at the same time, and is indicative of the movie having only the most basic of gimmicky points to it. There’s no arc for any character here -they are all merely the fully-formed versions of their comic selves, and beyond that little expansion of Charlie Brown’s family story that I don’t imagine anyone was much interested in, it is largely just an excuse to send these characters off to France. And in fairness, that context provides a few good opportunities for jokes and amusing situations; but a feature film should be made up of more than that. Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown did not make any kind of an impact and I understand why.
Still, these movies are fascinating. Over the period of eleven years that they came out within, we can see the evolution of the comic strip reflected. Characters like Peppermint Patty and Woodstock aren’t even in the first movie, but by these later entries are major characters -at the expense of older central characters like Lucy and Schroeder. The first two movies were concerned at least in part with representing valuable themes for children against slice-of-life contexts and a series of bits ripped from the comic against a few flourishes of budget and format. The latter two are simple adventure stories without much overarching meaning and feel less like films than slightly longer television specials -and I think both Paramount -which distributed the movies- and audiences realized this. As far as I can tell United Media Productions, which produced the movies under Universal Press Syndicate, never made another theatrically released movie. And when the Peanuts gang eventually returned to the screen for The Peanuts Movie it was well-past the strip’s run and Schulz’s passing and even the last of the television specials that had been consistent for over forty years. It was also very deliberately cinematic in a way that the original run of movies were not. But they are still valuable, the first two especially stand out as highly as the best of the specials, and deserve maybe a little a more attention. In lieu, though I haven’t kept up, I’m glad that Apple TV has been interested in given Peanuts its due. On its seventy-fifth birthday, it’s power is still assured, and I hope we see another movie someday.
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