The cinema hasn't been short on comic book adaptations in recent years – just ask Marvel if you're unconvinced. One notable absentee, however, has been Peanuts, one of the longest-running and most popular comic strips in history, which ran from 1950 until 2000 from the pen of creator Charles M Schulz.
When Schulz passed away in 2000, it seemed Peanuts died with him. Now, thanks to a script written by his son Craig and grandson Bryan, Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts crew ride again, and the critics seem to love it.
Craig Schulz insists, however, that this is something different to the usual comic book adaptations. “My personal hope was that the movie was simply going to be the rock falling in the pond. When people see the movie they’ll go back to the comic strips and the comic books and we can get parents to read to their kids again,” he says.
"My generation all grew up and learnt how to read pretty much by reading comic strips, whether it was Peanuts or DC [Comics] or whatever, and these days people are just on their cell phones all day long, and I would like people to go back to reading comic strips. Not only because of what my dad did, obviously, but I think his messages are so timeless.
“There’s so much to learn, and having that quiet time in your bedroom reading your comic strips, even though it takes all of four seconds, the messages are so powerful, and it’s a great thing as a kid to do that by yourself. That’s my hope for the movie. We have no plans to make this into a big movie franchise and make money. This movie is all about honouring my dad’s work and the rest is extra.”
Schulz's father's legacy is clearly at the front of his mind with the new outing for the Peanuts crew. "This is my dad's work, his legacy, he spent 50 years doing it and the last thing we wanted to do was screw it up after almost 18,000 comic strips, 50 TV specials and a Broadway show," he says.
“There’s not much new you can do, but with the Blue Sky Team and the CGI animation we did something new visually and created something new as far as the story, its complexity and its multiple levels.”
The Peanuts characters are, of course, ingrained in the memory of several generations of adults who encountered them as children during their 50-year reign.
Schulz admits that there were challenges in staying true to the originals in 2015. “It was the first time we’d done it without a black line around the characters,” he says. “It took us about a year just to get one character right. That’s a year out of a three-year project and if you don’t have your characters looking right then you’re kind of in trouble. It was a little scary wondering if we could even make the characters look right, but when the team finally got it right it was amazing. Luckily nobody got to see the earlier versions of the characters.
“At the beginning, everybody thought this would be the easiest movie they’d ever had to make. The characters were already designed, we knew their personalities, all we had to do was make it. Just scan him and make him. But then they realised that when you turned Charlie Brown round in 3D, that doesn’t work anymore. I think in the end they hit a total home run solving these problems, but figuring it out was like landing on the Moon.”
Schulz also seems to hope that the return of perennial loser Charlie Brown could act as a wake-up call to parents in a politically-correct world where every child is perfect. “Charlie’s the ultimate hero. He’s the guy that never gives up. How many people would lose 1,000 baseball games in a row and still go out and stand in the rain for another one? He’s a unique character like that, but at the same time I think most of us have more Charlie Brown in us than we realise.
“I raced motorcycles for 40 years, and I know you lose a lot more than you win, but the lessons are the important thing. I think parents don’t understand that these days. When your kids win every single time, there’s nothing to learn, but when you lose you only have one place to go and that’s up. I think Charlie Brown can keep reminding people about that. Losing and coming back is better than this modern thing of every kid on the playing field gets a trophy and ‘they’re all winners’, because eventually they’re going to hit the real world and go, ‘Oh, we don’t always win in the real world.’”
He concludes: "We have no plans to make this into a big movie franchise and make money; it's all about driving kids to read. We did a survey once in the early days of this and said, 'How many of you read to your kids?' And no one raised their hands. 'How many kids know Peanuts?' They didn't.
“We’ve heard after the movie that kids are flocking to bookstores and want to know more about the characters, and that’s exactly what I want the movie to do. Of course it’s created a lot of products too, but that’s really just an extra. The real benefit and message is within the script.”
cnewbould@thenational.ae
