Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown Blu-ray delivers stunning video and great audio in this enjoyable Blu-ray release
Linus is pushed to his limits when he learns Grandma is coming to visit and plans on ridding him of his childish security blanket. As Grandma's arrival looms closer, the Peanuts gang tries to help Linus learn to cope without his fuzzy crutch.
Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown aspires to new-classic status. It dreams of rubbing shoulders with the greats -- A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown -- and employs a bold, extremely novel approach, with the vast majority of its words and storylines lifted directly from fifty years of the late Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" strips. And to some degree, it succeeds, channeling the original Peanuts gang by way of Schulz and clinging for dear life to the very comic strip so many fell in love with during Schulz's daily newspaper reign. But it all feels a bit too erratic. Too unfocused. It's a shotgun blast of "Peanuts," some of which hits the mark, some of which fires wide, all of which could have been more precise and polished had writer Stephan Pastis been given more freedom in assembling some of Schulz's most beloved strips into a more cohesive original movie. That, of course, would require Pastis to overwrite, or at the least, exercise more authority over Schulz's work, and that option wasn't on the table.
Pastis signed on with full knowledge of the challenge executive producer Craig Schulz had issued: write a script for a new 45-minute Peanuts special using nothing more than his father Charles Schulz's comic strips. Pastis, in turn, dug through decades of strips looking for a recurring storyline that would best serve the project. With more than a dozen running plots to choose from -- Charlie Brown's football mishaps, Snoopy's the Red Baron, Charlie's crush on the Little Red-Haired Girl, and Lucy's psychiatric booth, just to name a few -- Pastis settled upon Linus' blanket. Then, reading through those strips, pulling out the blanket strips and constructing, scene by scene, a viable movie. "I'm a guy who's basically been given a model ship kit," he says. "And there's 18,000 pieces. Build the ship. Is there artisticness in that? Yes. But it's different. That's a different process. And then when you connect the pieces, sometimes there's a piece missing, and so I've got to fill that in and make sure it's consistent with the rest of the ship. At all points in the writing, the strips were scattered all around me. Around my feet, around the chair, around the table. It was the constant source of inspiration." He tacks on one last statement: "I don't view myself as a traditional writer here. I'm more of an assembler."
The result? A movie that feels as if it's been assembled rather than written. As noble as the experiment may be, as true to Schulz's strip as it is, the end -- say it together now -- doesn't justify the means. The story lurches from character to character, blanket swipe to blanket swipe, as Lucy sets her mind to breaking Linus' addiction to his most cherished possession. Linus spirals further and further downward, and the rest of the Peanuts cast graduates in, although often out of necessity minus the invention. A decent little plot develops, but it never feels like anything more than a collection of spare parts. The individual parts still work as assorted strips. Flip through any "Peanuts" collection and Schulz's work is as clever and funny as ever. But the joy of reading a comic strip is in hopping from idea to premise, joke to laugh, setup to punchline. Linus' blanket woes were hilarious because they were sprinkled over fifty years of other characters' woes; his dependency, like old habits that never leave us, pounced on him again and again, year in and year out, without fail. And they were all the more effective for it. Here, though, crammed into one small space, it's overkill. There's a reason Schulz and his comic strip contemporaries spread out their storylines and only revisit certain bits from time to time: it works best that way.
That doesn't mean all is lost. Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown will still delight "Peanuts" fans for a number of reasons, if only in part. I'm sure the ensuing nostalgia will be enough for some, and the carefully devised throwbacks to the specials of old will be enough for others. The animation is strikingly similar to longtime Peanuts-series animator Bill Melendez's work, the voicework recalls the original cast and delivery of Schulz's '60s TV specials, the timing dead on, the music like coming home, the words straight from Schulz's pen, the gags familiar, and entire strips are presented just as so many will fondly remember. I wonder if knowing the nature of the special ahead of time (rather than learning about Pastis' parameters afterwards via special features) would have changed my reaction, or even made the herky-jerky storytelling more forgivable. I suspect it would've. Ultimately, though, whether or not concessions are made, Happiness is a Warm Blanket gets a lot right and gets a lot wrong. The idea of creating a movie from Schulz's strips and Schulz's strips alone is a fantastic one. The execution could have used some more work, starting with removing the chains from Pastis' wrists and allowing him to be more of a traditional writer and less of an assembler.
Warner's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer is excellent, with lovely Sunday-strip colors that harken back to the original Peanuts specials, inky black levels and refined detail that captures every nuance of the animators' '60s throwback animation. Line art is crisp and clean, grain is nicely resolved and contrast is dialed in perfectly too, without any significant issue of note. The slightest hint of artifacting appears from time to time, but banding, aliasing and other eyesores are nowhere to be found. All told, Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown looks great, despite appearing -- convincingly I might add -- as though it hails from the mid-1960s.
Warner's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track also comes as a welcome surprise. Dialogue is perfectly intelligible and prioritized, and has the distinct tonal quality of '60s television special voicework, departing only in that the illusion isn't allowed to hinder clarity or fidelity whatsoever. The LFE channel lends unexpected weight to the proceedings as well, just as the rear speakers, restrained as they are, manage to expand the two-dimensional world of Charlie Brown into a more three-dimensional, enveloping soundfield. It isn't going to blow anyone away, but that's precisely the point. This is old-school television specialing done well, and in 5.1 lossless no less.
Deconstructing Schulz: From Comic Strip to Screenplay (HD, 12 minutes): The supplemental package doesn't offer a lot, but what it does offer is substantive. First up, "Deconstructing Schulz." Writer Stephan Pastis, executive producer Craig Schulz, director Andy Beall and other notable members of the production team discuss the project, Pastis' process and the manner in which thousands of Charles Schulz's strips were whittled down and assembled to create a functional movie.
Happiness is Finding the Right Voices (HD, 12 minutes): Casting real kids, honing deliveries to recall the original TV specials' tone, nailing the voicework and putting it all together into the final film.
24 Frames a Second: Drawing and Animating a Peanuts Movie (HD, 14 minutes): From the decision to make another Peanuts special to its finalized look, the production and animation of Happiness is a Warm Blanket.
Deleted Scene (HD, 4 minutes): Director Andy Beall offers a lengthy introduction to a single deleted scene.
Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown is an interesting experiment in reverse Peanuts-engineering, but it never quite lifts off the ground and soars. Scattershot and uneven on the whole, the ode to Charles M. Schulz's original comic strip is delightful and a bit off-putting, which prevents it from achieving classic Peanuts status alongside the greats of old. Warner's Blu-ray release is better, with a terrific video transfer, solid DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track and a decent but slim supplemental package. Ultimately, fans of Schulz will be particularly pleased with the treatment his strip has received and probably overlook a majority of the movie's flaws in the process. And at a low price, it's a steal, to say nothing of the fact that you could do much, much worse than adding this one to your cart.
