JOIN USNuts about Peanuts
It’s a gag that Peanuts fans know all too well. Charlie Brown asks Lucy to hold the football, and he goes to kick it. She moves it away just as Charlie approaches, and he flies into the air.
The scene was a must for The Peanuts Movie, the new 3-D, digitally animated update to the Peanuts comic strips and television specials. But the film shows it in both a way it hasn’t been seen before and a way that feels totally familiar. The film’s director, Steve Martino, not only hoped to make the world of Peanuts more tactile, but he also wanted to firmly ground it in the essence of Charles M Schulz’s original drawings. Here is a discussion of the gag, with commentary from Martino and the animation supervisor, Nick Bruno.
Keep it simple
The Blue Sky Studios animators try to do something different stylistically with each project, from the prehistoric but modern-looking characters of Ice Age to the elaborate jungle settings in Rio. With Peanuts, the goal was to simplify. “We made a concerted effort to do exactly what we saw in the comics and the specials,” Bruno said. “When it came to building a character, I wanted to be sure we hit every single pose that you saw in the strip. From there, we figured out how to move that character.”
Shifting proportions
They realised that Schulz changed proportions depending on factors like a character’s expressions or stance. The loop of Charlie’s hair would look more like a candy cane in profile, and the size of his head and position of his ears would change as well. Riggers, the artists who create the controls for animation, gave the animators a greater level of management as they moved the characters from pose to pose.
Conveying motion through multiples
Usually in computer animation, a motion blur is applied to fill in the details of fast action. Here, the animators created that motion in a way that was reminiscent of hand-drawn work: They added multiples of an object. When Lucy moves the football away and Charlie begins to kick it, you see many more limbs in the shot. “We do that to create the illusion of the fast-moving feet,” Martino said. “It’s the old style of creating motion blur.”
It’s all about the lines
Martino spent time at the Schulz museum in Santa Rosa, California, looking at the Peanuts creator’s tools. He was inspired by a video there of Schulz drawing the characters and discussing his work. “What I kept processing over and over was the magic and the beauty of that pen line,” he said. “I wanted to retain some of that quality.” Those lines are seen in the eyes and mouths, squiggles drawn onto 3-D figures.
Some ‘mistakes’ are meant to beThe animators created a stuttery movement to give the characters more of a stop-motion feel. The idea was to make some of the animation feel almost like a mistake. “We wanted something that wasn’t perfect, that wasn’t clean or crisp,” Bruno said. They created speed lines to suggest motion, like those in this shot, and to look like those from the strip. “Using a programme called TVPaint, we would animate the 2-D lines on top of the 3-D motion,” he said. The animators scanned high-resolution images of the actual lines drawn by Schulz and incorporated them into the film.