Warm Blanket review
- By : Nat
- Category : Animated Peanuts, New releases, Reviews
The folks behind the new DVD Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown had a difficult assignment, and they did a strong job with it – it’s not some sort of out-of-the-ballpark homerun where you’ll forget about the great Peanuts specials of the past… but it’s better than a lot of the specials, captures Peanuts quite well, and that’s despite facing not only the stricture of having to work almost solely with existing strips, but also being saddled with a 44 minute run time, which is an awful long period to fill with 4 panel segments.
The special is built around Linus trying to keep his blanket despite the various forces working against him – the blanket-thieving Snoopy, blanket-hating grandma, and blanket-hiding Lucy. Peppered through it are various b-stories, mainly Lucy/Schroeder interactions and Charlie Brown’s attempts to fly a kite, although some work is given to Patty, Violet, Shermy, and Pig-Pen (the goal was to create a mid-‘6os special, so you won’t find later characters like Spike, Rerun, or even Peppermint Patty here – although they did cheat a bit and open with Woodstock or at least a Woodstock-like bird; such would not appear in the strip until 1967.)
The basic visual design is very much like the early specials, but on top of that look they do a variety of zoom and transition effects which you would not see then, as well as a few shots from more aggressiee angles than I recall seeing in anything but Flying Ace sequences. Most of this new stuff worked quite well, although I think there were a few transitions that were more clever than they were effective.
It’s easy to look at the animation and think “hey, they didn’t get the three-quarter angles just right”, and other reactions like that… but then you remember that the old specials had some trouble whenever they went to the odd angles, it’s just they solved it a little differently.
The image is widescreen, understandable for the modern HD world… but I think that actually comes at a price in the visuals. After all, Peanuts was designed for fairly square panels. Keep the characters tight together, and you can end up with a lot of dead space on the side. Separate the characters to opposite sides of the screen and you lose the physical intimacy between characters which some subtlety of the humor rests on. This is a minor matter, but it did give me cause to reflect.
Music is by Mark Mothersbaugh with occasional help from Beethoven. While the actual Guaraldi music is gone, Mothersbaugh (best known for his band Devo) does manage to capture the strolling sensibility of some of that work. I don’t think there are any classics generated here, but it works for what it’s supposed to work for.
The reaction here was interesting. I have s son who is one-and-a-half and really doesn’t watch TV; he rarely pays attention to it even when he’s in the room. And yet, after dinner, he came and grabbed the DVD case on the table, waving it and pointing to the TV set, making it quite clear what he wanted. He watched for a while, happily identifying Snoopy and “blanky”! His older sister, 6, who was interested in watching it when she heard I had a new special, but lost interest when she heard the title – because she had just read the book adaptation (not the upcoming graphic novel adaptation, but the prose-and-picture adaptation). But once it was on, she watched it, and as usual got quite strong laughs out of the slapsticky scenes. Both kids faded on to other interests before the full 44 minutes elapsed, though.
At the end of the DVD, the warnings and licensing restrictions roll by… and by, and by. For some reason – presumably a production error – the disk carries the warnings that would be used not just on the US/Canada “region 1” DVD, but for a lot of different regions, some in non-English languages, some just noting that the disk is only for, say, the Phillipines.
All in all, it’s well worth watching. The DVD is now shipping, there is a Blu-ray as well… or you can watch it right now via Amazon Instant Video. (The run length listed for the Instant Video leads me to suspect that yes, it does include the DVD’s documentary extras on the making of the special.) The disk will not be available through Netflix for weeks yet, and I don’t know whether it will ever be available through Netflix streaming.
