The Peanuts Movie review: So caught up in nostalgia, this film fails to deliver

Some films are made for children; some films seem made by children. Snoopy and Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie, a 3-D animated film based on the popular comic strip Peanuts, belongs to the second category. The Peanuts Movie, produced and distributed by such bigwigs as the Blue Sky Studios and 20th Century Fox, is so devoid of basic intelligence, humour, and nuance, that it’s remarkable that a film like this even exists. But then you know the reason; nostalgia is often the crutch of the intellectually lazy, and simply recycling the past is supposed to cover up for the inadequacies of the present. [caption id=“attachment_2542464” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] A still from The Peanuts Movie.[/caption] The film opens to Charlie Brown, a preteen who’s not unfamiliar to failures and lacks self-confidence, the kind of boy both foolish and ambitious to fly a kite in winter. During the next five minutes, we see Charlie stumbling, slipping, and colliding, while trying to fly that treasured kite. And that’s what Charlie does pretty much throughout the film: He goes to his school, accidentally sets a toy airplane in motion, causing much trouble for him and his friends (which means more collisions and more tumbling); he isn’t particularly skillful at playing Baseball either; nor does he have the courage to speak to his crush, the Little Red-Haired Girl, who’s recently moved to his neighbourhood. The Red-Haired Girl is also Charlie’s classmate, prim and proper, sitting on the first bench, while Charlie sits on the last, looking at and longing for her, fighting hard to break the shell he’s so assiduously built around him. Charlie, The Peanuts Movie’s ‘hero’, is the sum total of our deepest fears: someone who’s courted failures, insecurities, and self-doubts to such an extent that they have become synonymous with him. Charlie is something we — want to — run away from, because for long, we have considered failures contagious; and, sure enough, Charlie is someone who’s slyly shunned by his classmates. But these are just ideas, and they don’t make a movie, their artful execution does. The Peanuts Movie is so besotted with portraying its lead as a miserable failure that it barely concentrates on anything else. The first three-fourth of the movie runs like a litany of Charlie’s goofs: his failed attempts at his school’s talent show, the winter dance, submitting a book report. (For a brief while though, Charlie’s fortune changes — his popularity in the school rises because he’s topped the standardised test, but, quite predictably, we soon find out that it was an error: His paper had been mistaken for his classmate’s, Peppermint Patty.) Scene after scene, we see Charlie faltering and fumbling, and the classmates having fun at his expense. What’s worse, none of that is even remotely funny. The Peanuts Movie is also unpleasantly loud and tediously one-note, in terms of its story, characters, and worldview — basically everything. This film is essentially trying to say this, a feat it achieves by much and needless hand-wringing: Despite your failures, you shouldn’t give up. The Peanuts comic strip was first launched in 1950, and that’s where this film, with its trite thematic concerns and one-dimensional storytelling, belongs.