Snoopy And Charlie Brown: the Peanuts Movie, film review: A Charlie Brown Christmas charmer

One of the pleasures of the Charles M Schulz Peanuts comic strips was their simplicity. It is a moot point whether state-of-the-art 3D animation adds anything to the original newspaper cartoons. There is a sense that the film-makers (who are the team behind the Ice Age series) have had to hold themselves back and to resist the temptation to stray too far from Schulz’s minimalism. What they have done remarkably well is capture the spirit of Charlie Brown.

Voiced by Noah Schnapp, Charlie is a woebegone figure with a pronounced inferiority complex. Whenever he tries to fly a kite, it comes crashing down. “She is something and I am nothing,” Charlie whimpers when a red-haired girl joins his class. He is desperate to impress her but doesn’t know how. All his little ruses seem to backfire. When he spends a small eternity writing a report on Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, his homework is lost in disastrous circumstances. He looks utterly crestfallen when his bossy friend Lucy tells him that he must prove he is a winner.

There is something engagingly haphazard about the way the film is structured. Chapters are strung together in no particular order. Interludes are thrown in involving Snoopy and the Red Baron. Adults don’t feature other than teachers making trombone-like noises instead of speaking. It is not quite clear in which period the film is set but it is not the modern, digital world. (None of the kids have smartphones or use social media.) The approach here is quietly subversive.

The self-effacing Charlie is the antithesis of the typical American movie hero. The film is charming and whimsical but makes some very trenchant points about the grimmer side of an all-American childhood.

Steve Martino, 93 mins Voiced by: Noah Schnapp, Mariel Sheets, Alexander Garfin