I just got out of the first local showing of The Peanuts Movie. It is a serious attemp to meld the small scale and traditional view of Peanuts with the richness and rapidity of the modern animated feature, and while it may not be some ideal version of Peanuts (to me, the ideal will always be the strip), this is a version that I’m glad I’ve seen and that I suspect will entertain the strips many fans as well as kids who have not experienced Peanuts before.

I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow review (and, given my economic ties to Peanuts, there would be plenty of reasons for folks not to trust my opinion!) at this point, but I’ll raise a few points that will be of interest to the Peanuts hardcore.

• The movie is definitely reliant on the first half of the Peanuts run, so you get plenty of material with the eventually-phased-out Violet and Patty, but no Rerun. (There is some minor use of post-1975 material.)
• Like all animated Peanuts, this is non-canonical, so you let things that would be out of place in the strip roll off of you, like Peppermint Patty and Franklin being in the same class as Charlie Brown. Oh, okay, I still had a little flinch that Linus was in the same class as Lucy.
• It doesn’t try to follow the animated specials as canon, so, for example, they don’t give Franklin the last name he was given in one of the specials. (There is one scene where they give other characters new last names, if you’re looking closely… and they’re the last names of the people who the characters were origially named after.)
• There are a number of wink-wink detail gags for those who are paying attention: paying attention to both the front cover and the back page of the comic book one character is reading, for example. (This is not unlike how Schulz used to show comic books that in the real world had Peanuts strips in them.)
• The film has two story arcs, one for Charlie Brown, one for Snoopy (and in fact in foreign territories those two are listed in the title.) Everyone else is just a side player in their story. If there’s a sequel (and this weekend’s box office numbers should let us know if that’s likely), I hope they give more story room to other characters, even if it means having fewer characters total.
• They introduce one romantic interest among the kids that I don’t believe has any history in the strip. It’s an interesting choice.
• The run time listed for the movie includes an Ice Age short that runs before it. I would not be surprised to see Peanuts shorts showing up before other movies.
• The kid film trailers that ran before the movie made a good reminder that this film is trying to keep itself in traditional Peanuts taste and not so much the modern kid film: all but one of the trailers shown at my location had fart or otherwise scatalogical jokes in them. The Peanuts Movie thanksfully did not.
• If you want to see everything, don’t get up when the credits start. As is the modern tradition, there are a couple short gags during the start of the credits…. but if you want everything, stay to the end of the credits and you’ll get another, very short piece.

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