The Peanuts Movie (2015)

The Peanuts Movie arrives sixty-five years into the life of a comic strip that never asked to be saved, and it behaves accordingly. Blue Sky Studios translates Schulz's line work into computer animation while animating on twos, giving the whole affair the gentle stutter of a stop-motion curio. The plot is familiar architecture: Charlie Brown pines for the Little Red-Haired Girl, humiliates himself at a talent show and a school dance, briefly rises on a standardized test he did not actually ace, then surrenders the medal. Snoopy types a novel in which he duels the Red Baron and rescues a poodle named Fifi. No new characters are introduced, a quiet admission that the ensemble was already complete.

Franklin is present, as he has been since 1968, and the film treats his presence as unremarkable, which is to say it does not address it at all. Lucy, Peppermint Patty, Marcie, and Sally hold their stations with the authority they have always had, though the screenplay extends no argument on their behalf. Charlie Brown's suffering is social and existential, rooted in clumsiness and the casual cruelty of children, not in body image or clinical diagnosis, and the film resists the temptation to retrofit either. There is no climate sermon, no indictment of commerce, no revision of the historical record. The Red Baron remains a German flying ace, and a dog's imagination remains a dog's imagination.

Whatever moral instruction the film offers is modest and arrives without a pulpit. Charlie Brown is finally chosen because he is compassionate, honest, and brave, a lesson delivered as a character beat instead of a curriculum. The result is an unusually well-behaved adaptation, faithful to a fault, content to let a sixty-five-year-old strip speak for itself. It is a pleasant film. It is also a film with almost nothing to say about the decade that produced it, which may be its most conservative instinct, or simply its most restful one.