Snoopy and Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie

Snoopy and Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie (U)

USA 2015  93 mins  Dir: Steve Martino  Starring (voices): Noah Schnapp, Bill Melendez, Hadley Belle Miller, Mariel Sheets, Madisyn Shipman, Francesca Capaldi, Venus Schultheis, Alexander Garfin, William Wunsch

Normally, the deal with these new screen versions of old comics/books/TV series is that the film-makers are happy to risk outraging original fans in the hope of snaring a lucrative new audience. This update of Charles M Schulz’s 65-year-old comic strip from Blue Sky, the studio behind the Ice Age movies, takes the opposite approach. In fact, the word ‘update’ doesn’t really apply. Despite their use of arguably pointless shiny 3D CGI animation, the filmmakers have been at pains to keep to the spirit of the original strip, right down to retaining its location in a mythical, period smalltown America where innocent kids fly kites rather than being glued to screens all day. Only the jarring inclusion of horrible modern auto-tuned pop songs breaks the spell.

There’s a downside to this approach, of course: chiefly the fact that the film feels like a series of four-frame strips strung together. For the first ten minutes or so, you sit there waiting for the plot to kick in after all the characters have been (re)introduced, only to realise that this is never going to happen. Instead, there’s just a rather thin central strand about Charlie trying to summon up the courage to befriend the unnamed little red-haired girl (unseen in the original strips, fact fans).

In their determination not to leave out anything that hardcore fans expect to see, the filmmakers occasionally resort to desperate measures. Even so, they still can’t find room to squeeze in the gag about Lucy pulling Charlie’s football away just as he’s about to kick it, so that’s relegated to the lengthy (10 minute) closing credits. These, incidentally, are an entertainment in themselves, since the thousands of people who worked on the film are divided up by department. Could there be a better job description than ‘Fur and Procedural Geometry’?

Luckily, there’s still plenty for audiences of all ages to enjoy. The decision to have the characters voiced by real children, rather than celebrities using silly voices, is a wise one. Snoopy’s trademark dance of joy and his fantasies of taking on the Red Baron atop his flying kennel, occasionally rendered in 2D, are great fun. You also don’t have to look too closely to see echoes of Wallace and Gromit in Charlie’s relationship with his long-suffering hound.

Despite the inevitable last reel feelgood betrayal, perpetually depressed Charlie, who’s dogged by feelings of inadequacy as an “insecure, wishy-washy failure”, makes a refreshing change from airbrushed characters in those perky modern toons in which there’s no ishoo that can’t be resolved by the appliance of fortune cookie aphorisms or reassertion of conservative family values. Hurrah too for the inclusion of hygienically challenged Pigpen, who ran the risk of being chopped out as an offensive caricature of poverty, or some such nonsense, in the current mania for po-faced PC banning and censoring.