Mar 18, 2014

Take a first look at CGI 'Peanuts' by Blue Sky Studios [updated in teaser]

Ahead of the film's teaser trailer premiere later today, we've got our first look at the bigscreen CGI adaptation of Peanuts that is being produced by Blue Sky Studios.

Film producer Craig Schulz, the son of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, is trying his best to justify this crushingly artless project that will very likely contribute nothing to his father's legacy. He told USA Today, “We'll see that Snoopy has soft-white fur,” and explained that although, “Bill Melendez got Snoopy off the ground in the TV specials,” that Blue Sky is “going to take it a step further.” We'll check back in with him 48 years from now, which is how many years Melendez's A Charlie Brown Christmas has aired continuously, and see if Blue Sky was indeed able to take it a step further than Melendez.

The blandification of Peanuts, it turns out, is a Schulz family affair. Craig's sreenwriter son Bryan (Charles' grandson) is writing the film with Cornelius Uliano. “With my father's work this is three generation of Shulzes on this film,” Craig says, conveniently neglecting the fact that the original Peanuts was the brilliant and anguished outpouring of one man's heart and soul, not a group project. It stands to reason that if Charles Schulz had needed his son or grandson's help to make Peanuts, he would have asked them when he was alive.

The Steve Martino-directed film is due to be released on November 6, 2015, so I've still got another year-and-a-half to get really angry about this film.

[UPDATE]: Here's the first teaser trailer, complete with scribbly lines over the CG so the filmmakers can claim they were faithful to Schulz's original artwork:

And in case you want to obsess over Snoopy's soft-white fur, because according to Craig, the CG “brings you closer into the comic strip,” here are the characters in super-detail. Click on any of the images in this post for a bigger version.

(Thanks, Pedro Nakama)