Good grief.
About a month ago, the ubiquitous comic strip Peanuts (featuring Good Ol’ Charlie Brown) celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary, and that is a big deal. It is rare to see a work that has had such a monumental impact on its entire form the way that Peanuts has. And for being such a landmark it has also held up extraordinarily well for something that began in the 1950s. Its characters and sense of humour still resonate, as much in the classic gags as in the dimmer beats reflective of its depressed kid protagonist. I still find it astonishingly deep as I read it back. Charles Schulz’s cartoon, with only him at the helm, ran for half a century before ending in the early months of 2000 just before Schulz’s own death in a bit of poetic fate. It’s legacy though has continued on, and for the moment at least, its cast of characters are still iconic.
I’ve written here before of my love for the comic strip medium, and that is the format that Peanuts most purely belongs in. But part of what kept it so relevant was its franchise, specifically on television and film. It’s TV specials, most directed by Bill Melendez and produced by Lee Mendelsohn, are their own institution -from the very first A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, through It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, You’re in Love, Charlie Brown, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, and many more. But often forgotten amidst these were the movies in the Peanuts series. There was a fair bit of attention ten years ago for The Peanuts Movie, which was a good and very underrated little animated gem -but it was in fact the fifth time Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the gang appeared on the big screen. And so for my theme month this year on such a significant anniversary, I thought I would go back to those original Peanuts movies and assess their quality and representation of the strip’s virtues.
It began in 1969 with A Boy Named Charlie Brown, and though it’s a movie often forgotten today it was a very big deal when originally released. This relatively cheap independently produced and distributed animated film was the ninth highest-grossing movie of the year -a year that also included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, The Italian Job, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, True Grit, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. A Charlie Brown movie was in their ranks -and was also the first non-Disney American animated film to really turn a profit, showing the Mouse needn’t be the only game in town.
What is even more interesting is that the movie is very mellow, in keeping with the tone of the comic. It runs a bunch of episodic sequences adapting various strips and gags before really getting to the main plot, which revolves around Charlie Brown partaking in a spelling bee to get over his sense of failure, only to be pressured into taking his apparent skill in this area farther than he is comfortable with. But the preamble sets the scene pretty well -it must be remembered that there weren’t any newspaper reruns at the time, so if you missed a gag in print or didn’t save it, you might not see it again. And the bits we get here do set the context of Charlie Brown’s world quite well. We get arguably the most emblematic strip realized in the famous cloud conversation between Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus. Following this is a sustained sequence of Charlie Brown making a kite and then being completely unable to fly it. We see the conflict in his baseball team, over dandelions on the pitchers’ mound and Charlie Brown’s coaching style, and through ellipses the sense of them as usual failing to win a single game. There’s a moment of Lucy chastising Linus for bringing his blanket to school, setting up what will be an important plot point for him, and also Linus’s sympathy and encouragement towards Charlie Brown, which is always sweet. Snoopy has a nightmare involving his dastardly Red Baron, and of course Charlie Brown consults with Lucy’s psychiatry booth where she roundly mocks him before of course pulling her football stunt on him. The result is we are treated to a nice sense of the world and relevant characters before the plot finds a more direct focus.
And a spelling bee is a good context for this movie. It is brazenly uncinematic, but that really works to the charm of Peanuts and more specifically the small scale nature of Charlie Brown’s anxieties, which are quaint but always feel so big through Schulz’s writing (incidentally ‘anxiety’ is a word he is asked to spell in a running gag of depression-adjacent words he and his classmates comment on his natural inclination to know). The movie does a fine job playing off his inner monologue, as he surprises himself with how good he is -and you do feel the warmth of his finally feeling content in something he is good at. But where the movie shows its real value is in its illustration of what is essentially the talent market economy. It’s not enough that Charlie Brown wins his school spelling bee, which is all he really wanted. As his classmates drill into him, he has to go farther, representing the school then the state at the National Spelling Bee competition. Something he did for himself and his self-worth now has to be his priority, and the pressure is immense, as he resolves to learn the whole dictionary, finds himself spelling out every word he says, and just being a wreck by the time he reaches the national stage. It’s a great refutation of the toxic sensibility of pursuing accomplishment at the cost of the value in a thing for its own sake. Schulz was really ahead of his time in identifying and diagnosing that -especially in the culture of the United States it is an important thing to push against, and I can’t think of a movie since that has also done it.
Though the movie is certainly more cheaply produced than what Disney was doing at the time, its animation is a vast improvement over just four years earlier when A Charlie Brown Christmas (for all its charms) appeared to be made on the most shoestring of shoestring budgets. There are several beats to the movie that exist to show off a little more animation sophistication; bits where comic panels are represented as stylish split screens, when Snoopy comes onto the baseball pitch to blare the national anthem from a record player there is a grand abstract sequence that looks like it could be out of Nashville. Lucy emphasizes Charlie Brown’s bad qualities both on the pitch and in life through instant replay on a television. Later we’re treated to a classic moment of her pestering Schroeder that leads into him playing the second movement of Beethoven’s Sonata 8 in its entirety against a fantastical backdrop of Beethoven and music-themed imagery -clearly the movie’s gambol at a musical-visual fest a la Fantasia. Another one comes a bit later when Snoopy is skating at what might be Rockefeller Centre, him having accompanied Linus there in pursuit of his blanket that he loaned Charlie Brown in a nice little subplot wherein Charlie Brown having apparently lost it to Linus’s horror, the two scour the city in search of it. And it is very neat and a bit bizarre to see Linus and Snoopy against these big city backdrops -such a new environment for these characters.
The one cinematic touch that doesn’t quite work are the songs -that feel like a need to mimic Disney. Rod McKuen’s title song is nice and melancholy, but the others all feel very awkward, and these are characters clearly not designed for active musical sequences. It’s weird seeing Charlie Brown and Linus dancing to a half-baked song about “I Before E”. You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown premiered just a couple years before this movie, and perhaps that is why Melendez thought musical numbers could work -but it is a little bit different on Broadway where the characters don’t resemble Schulz’s artwork and the songs don’t have to be sung by children.
As is a common trope in Peanuts, the crash here comes at the eleventh hour only after things look like they are going well and in a very ironic fashion (see Sally’s “hockey stick” line from the Christmas pageant story). But like the strip itself, the movie has a nice message about perseverance through failure. Maybe the sweetest part is where Linus reiterates to Charlie Brown that life still goes on, the spelling bee wasn’t earth-shattering and he has opportunities ahead of him. Once more he fails to kick the football, in an iteration of the gag that is more visually interesting than Schulz ever could convey in the strip -but there’s an equilibrium to it. Even Lucy has gotten over the loss. A Boy Named Charlie Brown is a very good translation of the comic strip and what makes it special, not as encompassing perhaps as the modern Peanuts Movie, but the small-scale suits it perfectly well. The treatment Charlie Brown warranted and deserved.
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