Upcoming ‘Peanuts’ film gets spotlight at Charles Schulz Museum

Santa Rosa was the host of a Hollywood-style publicity blitz Friday, when some 40 media representatives from across the United States came to the Charles Schulz Museum to hear about the new animated feature film, “The Peanuts Movie.”

Journalists, including a Los Angeles contingent, met and interviewed members of the family of late “Peanuts” comic strip creator Charles Schulz, as well as the director of the film and a few of its young voice actors.

The 85-minute, 3-D computer-animated movie, the first animated “Peanuts” feature film in 35 years, is due to open nationwide Nov. 6.

“It’s my dream movie. I thought it would never happen, but it has,” said Craig Schulz, the cartoonist’s son, who co-produced and co-wrote the film with his son, Bryan, a recent film school graduate, and Bryan’s film writing partner, Cornelius Uliano.

The film features the “Peanuts” gang, from stars to bit players, including Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus and the rest, as well as the mysterious Little Red-Headed Girl and Franklin, the strip’s first African-American character, introduced in 1968 and voiced in the film by 10-year-old film actor Mar Mar, who attended Friday’s event.

Steve Martino, who directed the film at the 20th Century Fox-owned Blue Sky Studios, said the greatest challenge in making the movie was taking advantage of contemporary technology without compromising the deceptively simple look of Charles Schulz’s original drawing style.

“The characters needed to match what we saw in the comic strip,” said Marino, whose film credits include “Ice Age: Continental Drift” and the film adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ “Horton Hears a Who.”

Martino said he appreciated the close cooperation of the Schulz family, who taught the director to refer to the late cartoonist by his nickname, Sparky.

“We chose everybody involved with the film,” said Craig Schulz, who started work on the project eight years ago.

The family’s devotion to Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” legacy in producing the movie should please the strip’s fans, both old and new, said Schulz’s widow, Jeannie.

“I don’t think anybody outside the family could have done it,” she said.

Charles Schulz, who moved to Sonoma County in 1958, died in 2000 in Santa Rosa, after writing and drawing the “Peanuts” comic strip for nearly 50 years. At its height, the “Peanuts” strip ran in as many as 2,800 newspapers, and reprints still run in about 2,000 papers, including The Press Democrat.

The comic strip inspired nearly 50 animated television specials, two brief animated TV series and four previous feature films. The last one was in 1980, “Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back),” released in 1980.

This year marks the 65th anniversary of the debut of the “Peanuts” comic strip and the 50th anniversary of the landmark television special, “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@danarts.