Today, me and a handful of journalists/bloggers were shown a presentation for Fox’s upcoming THE PEANUTS MOVIE. I was hoping, of course, that we’d be able to see the whole film in one form or another, but we were told that the animation, score, and sound mix have yet to be finalized, so unfortunately that’s not what we got.
What we did get was a look at Fox and the Schulz family’s intentions for this franchise update, kicked off by a lengthy “pitch” from director Steve Martino and senior character technical director Mark Edwards. The pair led off by stating not only their own personal history and love for Charles Schulz’ original comic strip and Bill Melendez’ TV specials, but also their awareness of how crucial it was to pay proper respect to Schulz’ artwork and character designs. His son, Craig, and wife, Jean, said that the family would not have signed off on the film if the updated artwork wasn’t up to snuff, but Martino and Edwards dug into the ways they painstakingly replicated the character designs we know and love while bringing it into the third dimension.
They were dead-set on injecting the pen-lines and asymmetrical imagery into the animation, but going off of the pre-existing models wasn’t as simple or straightforward as one would think. One huge obstacle was getting the characters’ various faces right. As demonstrated via slideshow, in the original comics, the characters faces and hairstyles would change depending on what angle you saw them from, including (and especially) in the case of Charlie Brown himself.
For example, Snoopy’s snout is always in profile, even if he’s looking right at the camera. Seeing him head-on with snout facing the camera would look more realistic, but it wouldn’t indicate that it was the iconic character we were looking at. They showed us a still shot of Snoopy flying his doghouse with eyes facing the camera, and then moved the digital camera to Snoopy’s back, revealing that both his eyes and his full mouth were seemingly affixed on the side of his face so the camera could see them from profile.
Their solution was to create a sort of "Face Matrix". For each major character, they created a graph which showed their faces in various states and from various angles to use as reference. So instead of manipulating an individual model into whatever face they wanted him to make, they had to make a ton of faces for each emotion the character would go through throughout the narrative. They'd have to transition, on-the-fly, from one face to another on the matrix, which obviously made the animation process more arduous and painstaking in the goal to evoke the feeling of the original strip. After seeing the results, I'm grateful they spent the extra time and effort, because the CGI really doesn't feel that far removed from the original 2D animations.
Another problem they mentioned was getting Lucy’s hair right. She has all those little curls on her brow, which not only bounce now, but, as with Snoopy's snout, change shape and position depending on where Lucy is angled in the frame. A static 3D model of her didn’t work because she wouldn’t read as Lucy when she turned her head, as the curls would line up weird with the rest of her face. What they did was create several “digital wigs” for Lucy’s head that they could easily sub out frame-by-frame depending on the angle, so that no matter how she moved, she still looked like classic Lucy.
They animated “on 2s” instead of “on 1s”, meaning every second frame as opposed to 24-per-second. They thought motion-blur would diminish the sometimes choppy PEANUTS-iness of the movements, so they simply played with smearing and other effects to simulate the dance and action scenes. We saw stills of a scene with Snoopy dancing where you could clearly make out two different right feet or three eyes as his various body parts swing from side to side, creating the illusion of speed.
Another really cool element that we saw a little bit of was the use of 2D animation for the “thought bubbles”. Whenever a character would daydream and imagine themselves in a fanciful situation, a thought bubble would appear above their head, just like in the strip, and the proceeding animation is done in black-and-white outlines, which looks exactly like an animated version of the comic. So aside from 3D that’s been meticulously designed to evoke the original drawings, you have these EXTREMELY faithful animations popping up amidst the full-color, dynamic CGI. This happens more than a couple of times in the film, and I’m really excited to see more of it in the finished product.
After this presentation, Martino proceeded to introduce six nearly-complete scenes from the film, which he mentioned weren’t locked in terms of animation or audio.
The first clip was the opening of the film, in which we see Charlie Brown’s house in the midst of morning snowfall accompanied by the jaunty “Skating” music from A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS. Charlie’s sister Sally gets a phone call in her bed: it’s a snow day. We see all the major characters (sans Charlie) go out onto the ice and mess around, playing hockey and skating around freely. They inquire about Charlie, who storms out of his house with a kite, which prompts Lucy to jab him with the fact that kids don’t normally fly kites in winter. Charlie’s steadfast, maintaining that there’s a “good breeze” and that “the kite-eating tree” is leafless and therefore impotent against his attempts to fly his kite. A slapstick sequence ensues that inevitably leaves Charlie less than satisfied. It was a cute sequence that did a good job of reintroducing us to the 65-year-old characters and relationships, and despite the liveliness and quick pace of the action, it feels enough like PEANUTS to get the movie going right.
The next clip we saw was of a scene in school where Charlie & company are in school taking a standardized test. The teacher (in requisite “wah-wah” cadence) introduces a transfer student, and in walks The Little Red-Haired Girl. Charlie is, of course, immediately smitten. Meanwhile, Snoopy is doing MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE-style acrobatics to try and sit in the class with the real kids. Unfortunately, Lucy sniffs him out, and that’s the end of that. It’s a big bit that screams of the kind of surreal slapstick we’re used to from Snoop, and it was scoring solid laughs amongst the crowd.
After that, we were shown a montage that comes partway through the film. Turns out that, despite being distracted by the Red-Haired-Girl’s beauty, Charlie still got the top score on that standardized test, and there’s a series of scenes where he revels in his newfound glory. All the kids comically look up to him as a genius, tailing him around asking him questions and trying to leech off of his alleged brilliance. Sally starts gives tours of his bedroom, and eventually, everyone starts wearing the trademark yellow-and-black sweater. A funny moment occurs when Lucy catches a boy carefully retracing Charlie’s path in the snow; when she asks him what he’s doing, he replies “I’m following in the footsteps of greatness!”
There’s a significant subplot about Snoopy, a love-interest named Fifi, and the Red Baron, and the next scene we were presented was a dogfight over Paris between Snoop’s doghouse and the Baron’s WWI fighter plane. This sequence was dialogue-free, and featured similar action to what we saw in that second teaser. It moved well and had solid animation, but I wasn’t as crazy about this stuff as I was about the footage with the kids. There’s something perhaps overly simple about the more fanciful, imaginary Snoopy stuff that isn’t quite as charming as the relatability of the kids, but considering there’s a lot more of it in the finished film, I’m curious to see how it fits in with the rest.
Charlie decides to impress the Little Red-Haired Girl with his dancing, and the next two scenes dealt with his efforts to do so. The first was in Brown’s bedroom, where Snoopy lays out a bunch of those foot marker things (like the two busboys use at the beginning of 1941) to teach him some steps. Inevitably, the canine gets too into it, and starts blowing Chuck’s mind with some Flamenco moves, but eventually he gets some headway with a basic Charleston. This is the first thing we saw of Charlie and Snoop really acting like best buds, and their relationship is clear and adorable even without any dialogue.
Then, we saw a scene of a school dance near the end of the flick. All the characters are there, getting down, including a blonde kid doing a very recognizable jig from the old cartoons in the foreground. A SOUL TRAIN line forms for the kids to show off their moves one-by-one down the middle. Pig-Pen, Franklin, and Schroeder roll down the aisle, followed by Snoopy, who proceeds to try and steal the show with his madcap footwork. However, Charlie follows, and a really cute moment occurs: Snoop drops his showboat routine, and runs over to a nearby spotlight to shine it on his buddy. I was worried for a second that they’d put the Charlie-Snoop relationship to the side while the beagle stole the show (after all, he’s most kids’ favorite character), but I was touched to see that they prioritized showing his love for his “master”/BFF over using him for an easy laugh. Of course, Charlie doesn’t exactly Shabba-Doo across the dance floor, and something goes wrong, leading to a funny bit where Pig-Pen gets drenched in water and loses that permanent cloud of filth (his dance partner ceases to recognize him).
We concluded by watching the latest trailer; this was the only part of the presentation that was shown in Dolby 3D, the rest was in 2D. A brief Q & A with Martino, Edwards, Craig and Jean Schulz followed, where they emphasized their “family affair” approach to the property. Jean runs the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA, and the whole clan agreed with Charles sometime in the ‘70s that the comic strip would be permanently put out to pasture following his demise, which they’ve honored. They noted that four generations of Schulz have worked on PEANUTS in one form or another, including three on this film alone; Craig and son Bryan produced and co-wrote the film, and Craig’s grandson is apparently the voice of the “Following in the footsteps of greatness!” boy we saw in the clip. They also mentioned that Charles hated the name “Peanuts” for his entire life, and that he was constantly asked which of his characters was named “Peanuts”, which infuriated him.
While it’s requisite for the director of the update of a known property to swear his love for the original work, in this case, it felt genuine. Martino and Edwards were quick to point out a lot of things they could’ve done that would’ve simplified the animation at the cost of making it feel like something new and unlike the original strip/specials, but explained how at most junctures, the decision was to keep it faithful and reverent.
Even in these short scenes, it was clear that our beloved characters are still the same. Marcie still calls Peppermint Patty “sir,” Sally’s still lusting after Linus, Linus can’t let go of his security blanket, Lucy’s still a bitchy know-it-all (and still very much wants Schroeder), and Snoopy’s still dancing around and making weird, not-at-all-like-a-dog barking noises. Charlie’s still the same lovelorn, determined loser (the director even called him such) that we all love, and despite the complete lack of modern technology evident onscreen, is still as relatable as ever. Aside from a couple of contemporary pop songs (which, as in the trailer, feel wholly out of place), the film seems to have the same timeless vibe that has kept the specials in circulation to this day. It feels grounded and human, albeit with more speed and less melancholy than we’re used to from this world.
Someone compared the animation to the CGI in THE LEGO MOVIE, as its trying to use the tech to simulate a simpler, earlier style (2D animation here, stop-motion there). This isn’t GARFIELD or YOGI BEAR or ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS or something like that, where they take the character and Disney it up with big, goo-goo eyes and snappy voice acting. The footage felt like old-school PEANUTS, with minimal dusting off and sprucing up for the new generation, and that’s easily the best response I could’ve had to what I saw this morning. A bunch of us grown-ups were smiling and chuckling in recognition of familiar images and moments instead of groaning, and if the finished film can maintain that same level of nostalgia while giving new viewers a story they can connect to and fall in love with, this could be a sweet, special experience for audiences young and old come this fall.
THE PEANUTS MOVIE will kick you clear to the moon on November 6th.
