A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1970)

 

The main plot of A Boy Named Charlie Brown involves Charlie’s winning his school’s spelling bee and preparing for the national competition in New York. He only entered the school bee because he was goaded into it by Lucy and her fellow “mean girls” Violet and Patty, who thought it would be funny to see him fail. He wins, though, and sets out on a journey to learn a lot of spelling rules before his big moment in the national spotlight. However, a lot of the movie isn’t really about spelling. Instead, it presents aspects of the Peanuts comic strip with which we are likely very familiar: Lucy yanks a football away from Charlie Brown at the list minute, he fails in his attempt to get a kite to fly and not get “eaten” by a tree, Snoopy goes ice skating both as a hocky player and as a figure skater, Schroeder plays Beethoven on his toy piano, Charlie Brown seeks help at Lucy’s psychiatric booth, etc. A lot of it may be common images to fans of Peanuts and the many TV specials over the years, but the presentation of these moments can sometimes come in moments of pure animated fantasy. For example, Schroeder has an astonishing flight of fancy while playing Beethoven; it’s startling and beautiful and amazingly abstract. During a sequence involving the Star-Spangled Banner, the screen first becomes red and white, then blue and white, then back again. There’s a stained-glass effect during a basketball game, a split screen during a football game – it’s just visually dazzling. My favorite character in the strip, Linus, is his usual stalwart self, Charlie’s best friend and confidante. However, when Lucy gives Linus’s beloved blanket to Charlie Brown for good luck in New York, Linus begins suffering dizzy spells. The dance he performs with his blanket after their reunion is truly joyous. As for the national spelling bee itself, well, Charlie Brown keeps getting works right, primarily because they’re all words about failure and incompetence, concepts which he knows well. However, in the most Charlie Brown-ish of actions, he misspells the word “beagle.” Astonishing, really, that he can’t spell the word that describes his own dog, but he wouldn’t be the Charlie Brown we know if he didn’t fail, would he? There was no category for Animated Feature Film in 1970, so the Oscar nomination that the film received was for its music, including the title song written and “sung” by none other than Rod McKuen. In perhaps an unsurprising result, though, the score for A Boy Named Charlie Brown lost to Let It Be by the Beatles.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song Score