Newspaper comic strips may be a dying art form; it's been nearly a decade since Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes captivated a sizable audience, and newer strips seem poorly drawn and tediously unfunny. A generation ago, the last phenomenally popular American comic strip dominated virtually media outlet. A Boy Named Charlie Brown was the first Peanuts film released to theatres, and in some ways is the best of the Peanuts series.
The early Peanuts TV specials were often collections of gags pulled verbatim from the strip and organized around a holiday theme. A feature film requires more. For A Boy Named Charlie Brown, Charles Schultz and Bill Melendez decided to include a more elaborate story, and the plot holds up surprisingly well. Simply put, Charlie Brown, the eternal nebbish, finally finds something he is good at - Spelling Bees. The resulting film is a "rise-and-fall" type story.
Charles Schultz' comic strip was unique in that it combined pop philosophy with comedy; it achieved this goal surprisingly well, and the secret lay in Schultz' view of childhood. The Peanuts were not real children - they were idealized versions of what the audience likes to think of children as. Their comments never sounded like those that children would make, but like those that adults would make recalling their childhoods. Similarly, Bill Melendez' direction required simple, stylized animation that supported Schultz' UPA-influenced drawing style.
Charlie Brown is the Antibart Simpson. Never a brat or a troublemaker, Charlie Brown tries to get through his life quietly and with dignity, goals he is never able to achieve fully. In the first third of the film, he is unable to cope with therapy, coaches a miserable baseball team, is publicly humiliated, and even fails to get his kite off the ground.
Children will enjoy the episodic storytelling of A Boy Named Charlie Brown as will anyone who originally saw the film in the theatres. Schultz' strip is virtually the same now as it was in the 1960s, so current readers can probably enjoy the film without a problem. The only oddities about the film are the random psychedelic sequences (such as Snoopy's *Star Spangled Banner*) which were, perhaps, a concession to Peanuts' popularity among the youth of the 1960s.
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