Good Grief! Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy, Woodstock are the gang are set to make their big-screen debut after 20th Century Fox secured the rights to create a movie based on the Peanuts franchise.
Good Grief! Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy, Woodstock are the gang are set to make their big-screen debut after 20th Century Fox secured the rights to create a movie based on the Peanuts franchise.
The film is set to open Nov. 25, 2015, on the 65th anniversary of the comic’s newspaper debut, and the script will be written by comic-strip creator Charlie Schulz’s son and grandson reports Variety.
Even though the Shultz family connection remains, some Peanuts fans are worried that Blue Sky Studio (known for its computer-animated Ice Age series) and the director Steve Martino (responsible for the flicks Ice Age: Continental Drift and Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!) will stray from Schulz’s animation style.
The thought of a computer-animated Charlie Brown is just too much for the Atlantic Wire‘s Richard Lawson, who writes: “I know, I know, computer animation is the wave of the future — not even the future, the present — and there have been some beautiful computer-animated movies in the past. But that’s just it. Peanuts isn’t beautiful, it’s scrappy and simple and a little messy. That’s part of the whole charm. You cannot do Charlie Brown with computers because that is too sleek and cold and mechanical.”
Just in case 20th Century Fox does manage to mangle Peanuts, here’s a classic Snoopy dance from A Charlie Brown Christmas, which was released in 1965, back in a simpler time when animations were drawn by hand and when dogs danced on pianos.