Peanuts Review
By Jonathan Celiz
Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts has been a cultural staple for years, ranging from their famous tv specials to musicals and now finally a feature film. Expectations are high if the people at Blue Sky Studios and 20th Century Fox can provide a movie that’s a worthy addition to the Peanuts legacy.
Blue Sky Studios has been known as being the distant third-tier when it comes to feature animations while they’ve had success with the Ice Age franchise, their films have never reached the height compared to the likes of Pixar and Dreamworks. Whether they could faithfully adapt Peanuts had led to some understandable concern among fans fearing it would stoop to the trends of celebrity voice acting and questionable pop culture references in order to appeal to a younger audience.
Fortunately, neither is the case as the movie itself is just as charming and timeless as Peanuts ever was. Even with the incorporation of cg, it’s easy to tell how much effort went into translating Schulz’s style into 3D with none of the awkward hyper-realism that plagued other computer-generated interpretations of classic cartoon characters. Even the smallest details such as never seeing the bottom of Snoopy’s plane during the highly-elaborate Red Baron scenes.
The story itself keeps it’s charming and simple as it’s more of a collection of vignettes rather than a single cohesive story, the only thing tying them together is Charlie Brown’s attempts at impressing the “Little Red-Haired Girl” and the Red Baron sub-plot that pops up occasionally throughout the movie and are a treat to watch in digital 3D.
With only a few gripes at the pacing, this movie is by far Blue Sky’s most consistently great effort that is thoroughly entertaining for all ages and hopefully sets a precedence for their future films and makes for a worthy box office contender that stands out to the other 2 big animation giants this holiday season.