It started out as an easy set of lessons to coast into the Thanksgiving Holiday. My classes were working on literary essays about character, and The Peanuts Movie seemed like an engaging and accessible common text, loaded with familiar characters that would give some students a little scaffolding. With a running time of just over 90 minutes, showing the film episodically would easily fill the last three days before the break.
I owned the movie, and I had used the first 15 minutes for an activity I did last year, but I had never seen the whole thing. Even so, I was not concerned about inappropriate content, and I was confident that I could make it work with the assignment. And so there I was, watching most of it for the first time right along with my first period class.
For those who are not familiar, the plot revolves around Charlie Brown and his crush on the little red-haired girl who moves in across the street. Many of the well-known features of both the comic strip and classic animated shorts are present. The movie opens on a snow day where all the characters ice skate around an unsuccessful attempt at flying a kite by Charlie Brown. Sally is his adorably self-involved younger sister, Linus, his sincere and intellectual best friend, Lucy, the brutally honest kid who runs the neighborhood, and Snoopy, his wildly eccentric pet beagle. Woodstock, Peppermint Patty, Marcy, Schroeder, Patty, Violet, Pigpen, Shermy, and Franklin are all in the movie, too.
Although the story starts out formulaically, the tone is a little bit warmer than that of past Peanuts shows. When the kids return to school and meet their new neighbor, a smitten Charlie Brown vows to capture her attention. What follows is a refreshing string of near successes. He puts together a terrific magic act for the talent show, but then sacrifices it to save Sally. When he notices that the little red-haired girl likes to dance, Snoopy teaches him to dance and he practices well enough to actually win a contest, only to accidentally set off the sprinkler system before he gets to dance with her.
The streak continues when he gets a perfect score on the standardized test, and at last everyone recognizes him as intelligent and knowledgeable. Sally guides tours through their home, and kids pay to watch him sit in his chair and read. When book reports are assigned, he gets the little girl as his partner, and because she is out of town, he reads War and Peace in its entirety and writes a book report which Linus calls insightful and “beyond reproach”.
Oh, his luck doesn’t last long, but as I watched I realized how anxious Charlie Brown has made me all my life. Those kids scrape and scrabble through their lives without adult supervision or support. Their words and actions reveal the tension between civilized society and brutish self-interest, and Charlie Brown is the perpetual goat. Witnessing him win for a change was amazingly cathartic, and healed something in me that I didn’t even know was broken. At the very end, when the little red-haired girl acknowledges all he has accomplished throughout the movie (in perfect claim-evidence form) there was a huge lump in my throat, and I would have wept openly had I been watching it alone.
I think kids love Peanuts because it represents a world they know well, harsh but true. I love The Peanuts Movie, though, because it represents a kinder world; one I hope is also true.
