The Peanuts Movie (2015)
Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts comic strip ran from October 1950 until February 2000, the final instalment published the day after Schulz himself died. Over those five decades it became one of the most widely syndicated strips in history, appearing in thousands of newspapers across dozens of countries and spawning a cottage industry of television specials, feature films and merchandise that shows no sign of slowing down. The 2015 big-screen outing, simply titled The Peanuts Movie, arrived fifteen years after Schulz's death and represented the first fully computer-animated feature for the franchise, a fact that made longtime fans understandably cautious. The production was a joint effort between Blue Sky Studios (the outfit behind the Ice Age series, which I covered in Ice Age: Continental Drift) and 20th Century Fox Animation, with Feigco Entertainment and Peanuts Worldwide also involved. The screenplay came from Cornelius Uliano alongside Craig Schulz and Bryan Schulz, the creator's son and grandson respectively, a lineage that at least guaranteed a certain fidelity to the source material and gave the project a degree of family oversight that more cynical franchise revivals rarely enjoy.
At the helm is Steve Martino, a director with deep roots in Blue Sky's house style, having previously helmed Horton Hears a Who! and Ice Age: Continental Drift. His background in animation production made him a logical fit for a project that required careful stewardship of beloved characters, and the studio leaned heavily on that institutional knowledge. The central premise keeps things faithfully low-key by blockbuster standards: Charlie Brown, perpetual underdog and loveable fumbler, sets about trying to impress a new girl at school while Snoopy embarks on one of his Walter Mitty-style fantasies, this time casting himself as a World War One flying ace squaring off against the Red Baron. The voice cast includes Noah Schnapp as Charlie Brown (in one of his earliest prominent roles before Stranger Things made him a household name), Marleik 'Mar Mar' Walker as Franklin, Alex Garfin as Linus and Hadley Belle Miller as Lucy. Bill Melendez, the animator and voice artist who had been synonymous with Peanuts productions since the 1960s, is credited posthumously, his archive recordings of Snoopy and Woodstock's vocalisations carried forward as a tribute.
Cinematographer Renato Falcão faced the particular challenge of translating Schulz's resolutely flat, economical line-work into three-dimensional space without stripping out the warmth that defines the strip. The film opts for a look that retains visible outlines and a slightly stylised colour palette, a conscious nod to the source material rather than a wholesale leap into photorealism. The result sits somewhere between a pop-up book and a polished but unremarkable contemporary family feature. Composer Christophe Beck, whose credits range from Frozen to the Ant-Man films, provides a score that balances cheerful brass with the kind of gentle melancholy that has always sat at the heart of Peanuts. Vince Guaraldi's original jazz piano sound, so closely associated with the television specials, looms large as an influence and a point of comparison, and Beck's work is in quiet conversation with that legacy throughout. Editor Randy Trager keeps the film's 88-minute runtime brisk, which serves a young audience well even if it occasionally means the quieter, more wistful beats are not given quite enough room to breathe. For a companion piece on an earlier entry in the franchise's history, see also Snoopy, Come Home.
I went into The Peanuts Movie braced not to like it, and I was pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong. So much of the charm of the classic Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, for me, lives in that soft, hand-drawn look, the one you get in the likes of Snoopy, Come Home, and I was wary of what a glossy modern makeover would do to it. As it turns out, I rather enjoyed this.
The art style is the thing that could have sunk it, and while I would not say I loved the shift, I came to appreciate it. It is a vibrant, modern, three-dimensional take on characters I am used to seeing flat on the page, and at times it made me feel as though I were watching a Peanuts video game more than a film. That is not a complaint, just an observation about where the look lands. The voice acting is good, the soundtrack is fine, and the story is simple, but it is a children's film, and simple is no sin there.
The most telling verdict, though, did not come from me. My eight-year-old, squarely the target audience, wandered off after about fifteen minutes and did not come back. When a film cannot hold the very children it was made for, there is a ceiling on how good it can be.
I enjoyed it rather more than he did, which tells its own story. Three stars, a bright, good-natured update that works perfectly well without ever threatening the gentle magic of the originals.
The Peanuts Movie sits in a familiar and slightly awkward position for legacy animation revivals: respectful enough to avoid outright embarrassment, polished enough to justify a cinema release, but caught between a fanbase who measure it against decades of affection and children who have no particular reason to prefer it over anything else on the screen that weekend. It is worth noting that the question of who animated features are actually for is one that films like The Princess and the Frog and From Up on Poppy Hill answer rather more convincingly, each finding ways to satisfy adults and children simultaneously rather than landing somewhere in the middle. As a piece of family entertainment, The Peanuts Movie is good-natured, competently made and unlikely to offend anyone. Whether that is enough rather depends on how old you are when you watch it.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2026-10-03
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Peanuts Movie (2015) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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