Age Recommendation: This film is suitable for all ages. My two-year old loves it, my middle school students loved it, I love it.
Innocence is a difficult quality to define. Our first instinct is to define it by what it is not: it’s a lack of guilt, of guile, of blame or stain of sin. Even the word itself contains a negation, coming from the Latin root word in-nocens, “not-harmful”. In the legal system, “innocent” is a synonym for “not guilty”; we might describe a film as “innocent” if it did not have violence, or foul language, or sinful conduct, or potty humor. Innocence, colloquially, is freedom from evil, a lack of any morally bad qualities, an absence of wickedness.
But I would argue that innocence must be something more. Goodness is not simply a lack of badness; rather, evil is itself defined as the privation of something good. Innocence, then, must be a positive good, one linked with a time before evil corrupted what was originally beautiful and pure. Innocence implies a childlike trust in the world and people around you, a wonder at the goodness of creation, joy and laughter unmixed with cynicism, a recognition of right and wrong and the simple ability to choose good and reject bad.
In this sense, The Peanuts Movie is the most innocent film I’ve ever seen.
The film follows the titular Peanuts gang, but is (like all the best Peanuts cartoons) essentially the Charlie Brown and Snoopy show. Charlie Brown is smitten by a new addition to his class, the Little Red Haired Girl, and spends most of the film trying to impress her. Unfortunately, a series of mishaps always derails Charlie Brown’s attempts, and as the film goes on he fears that he has merely made a fool of himself and lost any chance of making friends with his cute new neighbor.
However, each of these mishaps only reveals the goodness and true innocence of Charlie Brown’s character. He wants to impress her by dancing, so he puts in the effort to learn how to dance. He is not embarrassed in front of his friends, nor is his failure due to laziness: instead, he slips on some punch he spilled while helping his friend Peppermint Patty with the snacks for the dance. His next thought is the school talent show, so once again he puts in a lot of hard work learning a magic routine, but when given the choice between impressing the Little Red Haired Girl or saving his little sister from embarrassment, he chooses his sister. He is feted by the whole school for getting a perfect score on a test, but when he realizes that his name was on the wrong test, he barely hesitates before revealing the truth at an assembly in his honor. Charlie Brown never takes a short cut and always puts in the work, but his integrity and care for his friends gets in the way of becoming popular and impressive.
And even though he could not see it at the time, each of these choices he makes to do the right thing is what really impresses the Little Red Haired Girl. At the end of the film, when he finally gets the courage to talk to her, she tells him how much she admires his perseverance, integrity, and patience through adversity. Charlie Brown is rewarded for his innocence, becoming friends with the Little Red Haired Girl not directly through any of the things he thought would get her attention, but because he is thoroughly good. Charlie Brown in The Peanuts Movie is therefore an exceptional role model for kids: he is not given what he wants by some magic fairy, nor does he use trickery or vice to win the girl, nor even by doing some great feat to impress her. He attracts a new friend by being true to his patient, loving, innocent self. Good Ol’ Charlie Brown.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention the other storyline of this excellent film, Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. Throughout the movie, we get interludes of Snoopy’s ongoing battle against the infamous WWI flying ace, adding a good old fashioned romantic adventure story to the already excellent Charlie Brown story. Snoopy imagines a story very much parallel to Charlie Brown’s, just with a lot more barrel-rolling and gunfire. He meets the beautiful Fifi, a photographer pilot, who is then kidnapped by the Red Baron and in need of rescue. Snoopy summons all his ingenuity and perseverance to hunt down the Baron and free the girl, using his wits, flying prowess, and friendship with Woodstock to save the day.
One of the beautiful things about this secondary story is that Snoopy always jumps in to tell it after one of Charlie Brown’s failures. It shows his genuine concern for his friend as he wrestles with the same sort of difficulties through story that Charlie Brown does in his life. It also provides a pick-me-up adventure after each bummer moment for Charlie Brown, keeping the story from feeling too repetitive or gloomy. In some of the Peanuts cartoons, Snoopy functions almost as a trickster-god, a malignant entity causing (generally hilarious) chaos in Charlie Brown’s life to the point where one might wonder why Charlie Brown keeps this dog around at all. In this film, however, Snoopy keeps all the cunning and chaotic fun while truly being Charlie Brown’s best friend, helping him through his down times and encouraging him in his attempts to befriend the Little Red Haired Girl. Snoopy is at his best in The Peanuts Movie, and he brings a refreshing spirit of adventure and fun whenever he is on screen.
The Peanuts Movie is one of the best kids movies of all time. It combines wholesome adventure and fun with true innocence, wonder, and friendship in a delightful and eminently watchable package. It will enchant kids and adults of all ages with its witty humor, timeless characters, and old fashioned fun. It stands in stark contrast with the over-stimulating and crass kids movie of the post-Minions (really, the post-Shrek) era and truly inherits the spirit and humor of the original Charles Schultz comics, War and Peace references and all. There is not a better film to show your kids, and they couldn’t have a better role model than Good Ol’ Charlie Brown.