A CGI Peanuts Movie Shouldn’t Be Surprising at All

FOR EVERY ESTABLISHED pop culture property that changes with the times, there’s a longstanding fan base that resists that change. Whether it’s Star Wars fans resenting Lucasfilm’s move to digital effects, Trekkers who hate lens flare, or Jem and the Holograms lovers who—actually, never mind. They’ve got a point.

Even by that familiar standard, things went terribly when the first trailer for a CGI Peanuts adaptaion appeared online last year. Vulture called the prospect of The Peanuts Movie akin to “emoji Guernica,” iO9 said it “feels wrong,” and the late film site The Dissolve just moaned, “It’s a freak of nature, Charlie Brown!” But all of that hand-wringing exposes a short very memory of how Peanuts attained its cultural ubiquity.

Charles Schulz drew the Peanuts strip for over 50 years, but what helped ingrain the characters in mainstream culture was fierce merchandising and expansion into other mediums. Schulz wrote four theatrical Peanutsanimated films during his lifetime (beginning with 1969’s A Boy Named Charlie Brown); there have been 45 television specials, the most recent of which debuted in 2011. Then there’s the fact that the first animated appearance of Peanuts characters was in a series of Ford advertisements, and Snoopy and the gang have been in MetLife insurance ads since 1985, along with countless other spokesperson/mascot gigs.If your beef is with the idea that the movie uses non-traditional animation, we’ve got some bad news for you: Peanuts characters got the 3D treatment years ago, thanks to videogames.Live-action isn’t out of the question either: Snoopy’s brother Spike got thrust into the corporeal world in the abysmal 1988 special It’s the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown..Peanuts may center on the hapless Charlie Brown and his innocent childhood, but the brand itself has never been as modestly art-first in the same way as, say, Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes. It’s a heavily marketed and highly valuable brand that depends on bridging the gap between parents who are nostalgic for comics and cartoons of their youth and kids unfamiliar with thePeanuts gang. The Schulz estate is still so profitable that it regularly ranks near the top in Forbes’ list of highest-earning dead celebrities. (Its revenue was estimated between $30-$40M in 2005 and 2015.) When Iconix Brand Group acquired the Peanuts brand alongside Schulz’s heirs in 2010, the Wall Street Journal cited annual retail sales in excess of $2 billion.

And what’s the move of the moment? Not traditional animation. CGI studios like Pixar, Dreamworks, and Blue Sky—which made its bones with the Ice Agefranchise—are the companies running the category, and have been for 20 years now. Ultimately, Peanuts isn’t concerned with a nostalgic ideal, no matter how many times Schulz’s son talks about working with Blue Sky to make sure the rain looks just like his father drew it. It’s a commodity looking for revitalization, and a foray into the medium of the day makes perfect business sense.

But is the movie even bad enough to warrant the firestorm? Not really, butThe Peanuts Movie does its best to provide a CliffsNotes summary of Peanutsgags to a generation unfamiliar with 50 years of comic strips and television specials. Everything’s here: the Kite-Eating Tree; the baseball mound; Lucy’s Psychiatric Help stand; there’s even a B-plot about the Red Baron and some Vince Guaraldi music. Artistically, it’s milquetoast: a slapdash array of comedic vignettes, musical sequences, and ripped-from-the-comics dialogue. If you’ve never seen a Peanuts special, this is a passable if unspectacular introduction to Charlie Brown. If you’re looking for a return to prominence, though, this probably isn’t it. But with an estate that’s historically shown no aversion to expanding, you can rest assured this won’t be the last update for the Peanuts characters. You thought the purists were mad now? Just wait until the inevitable VR experiences that let you lounge next to Schroder’s piano or have a dance party with Snoopy and Woodstock.