THE PEANUTS MOVIE (Steve Martino). 86 minutes. Opens Friday (November 6). See listings. Rating: NNN
Where to watch: iTunes
Charlie Brown squirms for the Little Red-Haired Girl. Snoopy has aviation daydreams. Adults still sound like broken windpipes. Some things never change.
The gang is up to the same old breezy, grade-school antics in The Peanuts Movie, a computer-animated facelift of Charles M. Schulz’s comic strips. Director Steve Martino and a writing team that includes the late cartoonist’s son and grandson stick dutifully, perhaps lazily, to the serial-style source material.
That’s not entirely a bad thing. Charlie Brown’s low-key adventures – flying kites and writing book reports – impart valuable lessons about self-worth. They’re appealing alternatives to the hyperactive noise kids are usually bludgeoned with.
If The Peanuts Movie works, it’s because there’s room for Charlie Brown in the imaginations of a new generation completely unfamiliar with his embarrassing dilemmas and resilient efforts to dust himself off, haters like Lucy be damned. Forget Jay Z. Charlie Brown is the Dirt Off Your Shoulder OG.
The material may be 65 years old, but the only thing kids today won’t connect with is the telephone cord that Charlie gets tangled in. Even in 2015, the Peanuts gang don’t have access to smartphones, iPads or the internet. That may seem anachronistic, but it also serves the movie’s classic pleasures of seeing kids get out, interact and learn how to play nice. The film evokes nostalgia for a tech-free environment our children will never know.
In a terrific sequence full of whiz-bang slapstick, Charlie Brown lugs a ginormous copy of Tolstoy’s War And Peace home from the library. That moment just couldn’t happen had he been able to download it.
