What ‘Peanuts Movie’ gets right about Snoopy

Even in Hollywood, Snoopy finishes ahead of Charlie Brown.

Just days before The Peanuts Movie hit thousands of US screens, Charlie Brown’s star beagle received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, right next to creator Charles M. Schulz — and before the dog’s very owner has even received one. (Good grief, indeed, Chuck.)

“My father would be so honoured that his favourite beagle is getting the recognition he so deserves,” Peanuts Movie co-writer Craig Schulz, who attended Monday’s ceremony along the Hollywood boulevard, said.

As a Walk awardee, Snoopy, who turned 65 this year, follows in the paw steps of such fellow animation luminaries as Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.

This latest recognition — with Snoopy eclipsing Charlie Brown’s luck — not only holds true to the dynamic of the beloved comic strip, but it also reflects how Snoopy is depicted in The Peanuts Movie, which opens in the UAE on Thursday.

Here are just a few of the ways in which the digitally animated 3-D film, directed by Steve Martino, faithfully nods to Snoopy’s history:

1. Veni, vidi, Vincent: Snoopy famously has a Van Gogh original above the stairwell of his curiously spacious, reality-defying doghouse. In The Peanuts Movie, Snoopy has occasion to visually unpack some of his showy home furnishings — including his canvas of The Starry Night. In that moment, the point is well-illustrated: Snoopy not only has no real master, but he also is often even master of his universe, living in a separate, starrier world from the neighbourhood’s l’il gang much of the time.

2. Pup literature: Snoopy, of course, is not just a symbol of fantasy sequences, but also a vehicle for escape. For Schulz, creating the strip itself was a form of exerting control through escape, so Snoopy rose over the decades from sight-gag quadruped to humanesque, wish-fulfilment hero. So in The Peanuts Movie, Snoopy the doghouse novelist, after typing, “It was a dark and stormy night,” gets to pen his own adventures of derring-do — as the First World War flying ace rescuing a damsel beagle from the Red Baron — as narrative counterpoint to Charlie Brown’s soulful but quotidian existence.

3. “War,” no peace: Besides nods to post-Impressionism and noir, The Peanuts Movie humorously references Tolstoy, and Snoopy’s noted favourite “word-a-day” book, War and Peace — the same weighty tome that dogs Charlie Brown’s academic career. And while Charlie Brown is bedevilled by the sliding book while “sledding,” Snoopy deftly rejects all that Russian literary peril with a nimble push. A dog’s life’s too short for such a time-consuming work.

4. Boy’s best friend: At heart, Snoopy is often at his warm-and-fuzziest when acting as a true friend to his nominal owner. In The Peanuts Movie, Snoopy is at his most emotionally alive not when rescuing Fifi the pink-frosted pilot or crawling behind enemy lines — or serving as a furry Harpo Marx of wordless humour — but rather when supporting Charlie Brown in his master’s attempts to meet and impress the Little Red-Haired Girl. The beagle’s affection rings as real, and so we, too, are moved.

So sure, the dance-happy Joe Cool gets a Hollywood star first. But hey, who better to understand Hollywood’s celebration of artful escapism than America’s First Beagle?