The Art and Making of Peanuts Animation – Review
The Art and Making of Peanuts Animation… consists of both an in-depth introductory section and a decade-by-decade look through various Peanuts specials and films from 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas to Happiness Is A Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown in 2011. If you’re unfamiliar with Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, a good comparison of the franchise’s effect on pop culture in America during the 50s and 60s is that of The Simpsons in the 90s: A critical and commercial success – at once totally mainstream, yet sophisticated and mould-breaking, proving an inspiration to a good few generations worth of cartoonists, comedians, writers and animators after it.
Since Peanuts can get a contemporary rep of being rather tame, ‘mould breaking’ seems like a hyperbolic description of the franchise, but it does lead onto the subject of it’s first animated special. 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas features tropes more or less accepted in today’s animated marketplace, but executives initially felt its discussion of holiday depression/commercialisation, combined with the use of untrained child voice actors and a jazz soundtrack, to be the makings of a flop. It’s from this underdog position that the book begins its tale.
The intro section covers the story of how the first special made it to television, before detailing the many facets of its production. The challenges in transitioning from strip to screen are visited with particular interest. Schulz’s chief concern – if he entrusted the strip he drew entirely by himself to a whole crew of animators, then the specific Peanuts world he’d created would be lost – took much assuaging. One example: the Peanuts characters were not designed using a traditional animation construction approach (i.e. composing characters of ovals and circles), thereby requiring a different set of animation rules to be worked out to convincingly turn the characters in space.
We also find quotes from contemporary Pixar artists, David Silverman (who had the same construction issue on The Simpsons) and the creators of Phineas and Ferb who all praise the solutions that animators, designers, producer Lee Mendelson, and director Bill Melendez came up with when adapting the strip. The problem solving tips discussed are timeless – don’t feel boxed in by precedents and be creative with the rules to adapt them for your own artistic needs (in this case to capture the feel of the strip as accurately as possible in another medium.) There is also a detailed look at Vince Guaraldi’s music for the specials, and a look at how the team opted to move forward after Schulz’s passing in 2000. All in all it’s a very throughout case study of animation production.
The second section contains very nice anecdotes, concept art, storyboards, thumbnail sketches and cell set-ups for various specials both produced and unproduced over the years. The book devotes more space to the acclaimed entries whilst quietly skipping past some of the less successful ones – This includes much of the late 80s and 90s – which are considered both the nadir of the strip and the specials. For the obsessive Peanuts fan, this lack of equal representation may be a let down, particularly if one of your favorites isn’t given much of the behind-the-scenes treatment, but with over 40 specials to cover there is obviously going to be some editorial preference at work.
Much like the mainstream appeal and artistic acceptance which Peanuts enjoys (rarely do both come hand-in-hand), The Art and Making of … is at once deeply nostalgic while also full of endorsements of creative rule bending which still apply in animation today – particularly the low budget auteur sort.
Finally, a quote from son-of-Charles, Craig Schulz who co-wrote 2011’s Happiness is A Warm Blanket, concerning his goal of preserving the integrity of his father’s world of Peanuts: “not many people know the boundaries of Peanuts…it bothers me, but I know at some point I’m going to be gone, or someone’s going to be gone, and its going to go beyond those boundaries.” With the announcement of a 2015 computer animated feature with Craig Schulz at the writing helm, let’s hope that day is still far off.
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