STACK #138 Apr 2016

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You’re a good man, Steve Martino Blue Sky's Steve Martino upholds the legacy of Charles M. Schulz’s long-running comic strip phenomenon in the new film adaptation Snoopy and Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie. By Alesha Kolbe

respectively – as a great honour. “Craig and Brian in particular have a real tremendous understanding of their father’s written word and the cadence and rhythm of that kind of dialogue – they provided a connection to the source material. That was so valuable for us in the making of this movie.” Anyone who has seen a Peanuts strip will recognise the unique artistic style that has since become iconic. From Pig-Pen’s omnipresent overlapping scrawl to Snoopy reclining atop his kennel, Martino didn’t miss a beat when it came to translating Schultz’s signature images into animation. “We went to great pains to draw our inspiration for the movie from the comic strip,” observes the director. “I did look at the animation styling that Bill Melendez developed on the specials, but everything about the writing of the film, so much of what we did in posing and designing the look of the world and posing the characters, for me it came from looking at the comic strip. That was my guide. “Even though we’re using computer animation, I believe that we can create an

detail now that I never had looked at before. I felt as though we needed to do that to deliver a film that felt right within the world of Peanuts.” Bringing the gang to life also involved close

C harles M. Schulz’s beloved strips featuring Charlie Brown, Woodstock, Lucy, Linus and friends total almost 18,000 over a period just shy of 50 years, and have been adapted numerous times for film and TV. The latest big screen version comes from Blue Sky’s Steve Martino ( Horton Hears a Who! and Ice Age: Continental Drift ), who has combined his longtime love of the Peanuts characters with his experience in animated features. “I grew up with these characters. I started reading the comic strip before I could read,” he says. “My dad and I used to share a love of the comics and he used to read them to me. “I’ll tell you, when I first started I thought, ‘wow’, what an honour to work these with characters.” While Martino had the passion and expertise required for The Peanuts Movie , he did face considerable pressure from friends and family to not “screw it up”. “That kind of pressure is a very good motivator,” he notes. “Certainly it’s what was in our tank for myself and the rest of the team at Blue Sky. We wanted to do our very best to uphold the tradition of what Peanuts has been for us in our lives.” To properly honour Schulz’s legacy, Martino and his team undertook a tremendous amount of research. “We had access to every comic strip. We were looking at the art, the writing, every aspect of what Charles Schulz created, with a level of

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We went to great pains to draw our inspiration for the movie from the comic strip

collaboration with Schulz’s family and members of his team, and the director feels he gained a lot of friends in the process. “It was that really good kind of working relationship where we would challenge each other along the way,” he says. Martino describes working with Craig and Bryan Schulz – Charles’s son and grandson,

experience that would be rich and detailed and worthy of a feature film presentation,” he adds. “I told everybody on the team I want to find Charles Schultz’s... pen line in everything that we do.”

• Snoopy and Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie is out April 6

FROM STRIP TO SCREEN

GARFIELD Born in 1978, Jim Davis’s fat feline became the world’s most syndicated comic strip. The 2004 film version proved less successful,

DICKTRACY Chester Gould’s lantern-jawed detective debuted in 1931 and is still read today,

THE PHANTOM Lee Falk’s costumed crime-fighter, aka The Ghost Who Walks, first appeared in

DENNISTHE MENACE Hank Ketcham’s mischievous moppet has been playing up since 1951.

in a world where smartwatches are

1936. 60 years later an awful film adaptation starring Billy Zane came and went, but the strip is still running.

His big screen debut came in 1993, with Mason Gamble as Dennis, and Walter Matthau as neighbour nemesis Mr. Wilson.

now a reality. Warren Beatty brought him to life in a not bad 1990 live-action version.

however, even with Bill Murray voicing the CGI cat.

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