THE PEANUTS MOVIE Review

The thing about Peanuts is that it's meant to be a comforting, nurturing type of experience while at the same time providing something of a profound simplicity to the themes it desires to tackle. It's kind of like the Pixar movies, but flat instead of three dimensional and computer generated. With The Peanuts Movie though, director Steve Martino (the last Ice Age movie) looks to bring Charlie Brown and his gang into the twenty-first century as they are presented in computer animated 3D. Fortunately, this doesn't seem to have changed the sweet and simple mentality the comic strip by Charles Schulz always took on. The characters and their world have been updated in no apparent way-they all still play outside by trying to fly kites or ice skating, there is no modern technology and even many of the same story beats we've seen before in the holiday specials that air every year are present here. I largely only have those specials to refer to as I'm of the odd generation that was too young to get hip to the comic strip when it was in it's newspaper prime (despite still running in syndication today) and am too old to have any genuine interest in this new movie. Still, it seems a childhood in America wouldn't be complete without having seen It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving or the original A Charlie Brown Chistmas at least once. Given this was my only frame of reference walking into the 2015 version though, it seemed like little more than a cash grab given it was being presented in 3D and released just as the Holiday season was upon us. Of course, capitalizing on nostalgia has become big business since the social media age took hold of our culture and everything is suddenly worth a second look, but given the age and importance that the Peanuts brand carries with it this somehow felt more risky, more greedy, more capable of destroying real childhoods. Given it's mostly more of the same I doubt this will offend anyone, but in fact it will likely do the exact opposite and resurrect all the feels these characters originally inspired regardless of generation-heck, it may even inspire a few children of our newest ones.