Movie Notes:The Peanuts Movie

I know you are all just dying to see this movie, and frankly, I was right there with you. But, chez moi, we have an entire hutch filled not with the "GOOD" dishes, but with Peanuts memorabilia, so truthfully, there was no avoiding it: I packed the kids of to my mom's house and took my very own Little Red-Haired Girl to see The Peanuts Movie.

Now, I know what you're thinking: Was it as bad as we all expected it would be? Did it poop on all the awesome holiday specials we remember from when we were kids? Was it a raucous cacophony of rude humor, obnoxious kids and fart jokes?

Sorry to disappoint you, but the answer is: NO. This movie will not make the list of movies that are so bad they're good. It won't join the growing number of "kids" or "family" movies that traffic in cheap humor about bodily functions. It won't even scar your memories of A Charlie Brown Christmas or It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

What it is, is simply wonderful.

If you've seen the trailers, you know that the animation is computer-generated. But they've managed to put faces on them that look just like the old comic strip, without it being freakish or out of place. The voices of t he characters are, for the most part, done by kids, as they were in the original cartoons. And somehow they managed to get kids that sounded pretty much just like you remember them. 

There is a plot, of sorts (two stories, really), with Charlie Brown trying to get the attention of the Little Red-Headed Girl, and also with The World War I Flying Ace (Snoopy) fighting his arch-nemesis The Red Baron, but mostly it's just a bunch of sweet, gentle humor, mostly drawn from the old cartoons and comic strips, which are put together in a way that feels, not old, not tired, but RIGHT. The pace is a little more frenetic than the old shows, and the movie is a little longer than the classics (it sure didn't SEEM like it), but it was so much fun that we sat trough the entire credits (which you should do, by the way: for the conclusion of a running gag) just watching the panels from the original comic strips scroll past.

Spoiler Alert: The ending of the movie MAY upset some purists (it didn't bother my Little Red-Haired Girl), but it fits with the tone of the movie and, frankly, serves to show that the entire movie was geared at providing a lesson to the younger set (and maybe some adults, as well) bout the nture of character and doing the right thing, even when it seems to be against on'e self-interest that was apparent in retrospect, but, like the lesson of the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree, was so enjoyable in the teaching that you won't even realize it was being taught.

Bring your kids. Bring someone else's kids. Bring a date. We loved this movie. It was the first 'G' rated movie I've seen in ages and far better then so much of what passes for kids' entertainment, these days.

Bonus:  I wanted to post this a while back, but it wasn't available. It's the short from this summer's Pixar movie, Inside Out. A lot of people apparently don't like it. They think it's creepy, or unpleasant, or weird. I think they're just hating haters who hate. I've seen this video about a dozen times, and I cry EVERY FLIPPIN' TIME.

Watch it with someone you lava.

CONTENT WARNING: If you are somehow offended by anthropomorphized geographic features behaving in a cis-gendered, heteronormative way, you should not only avoid this video, you should either seek professional help or just get it over with and off yourself, because, seriously, you are really annoying to most of the other seven billion people on the planet.

P.S. Volcanoes do NOT sound like that. They sound much more like Jabba the Hutt. It's a proven fact.