The 500 new short Peanuts animations being created by Normaal in France have been getting some attention of late. There are at least a couple of examples out there, floating around in the wild; I’m not going to link to them here because they appear to be unauthorized. But this French TV report will give you at least some sense of them:

I like that the visuals seem to be trying more to be Schulz than to be Melendez (although not without that influence). Not that there’s anything wrong with how Melendez brought the material to the screen! But that doesn’t mean that it’s the only right way to interpret the strip for animation. There are some moments where the mechanicalness of computer-aided animation comes through in arm swings and the like, but all in all, quite reasonable.

They may be only 90 seconds long, but with 500 of them, that makes 12.5 hours. That’s like a season-and-a-half of a sitcom. It’ll be a lot of material to watch!

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