A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
Directed by Bill Melendez
When Charlie Brown complains about the overwhelming materialism that he sees amongst everyone during the Christmas season, Lucy suggests that he become director of the school Christmas pageant. Charlie Brown accepts, but it is a frustrating struggle. When an attempt to restore the proper spirit with a forlorn little fir Christmas tree fails, he needs Linus' help to learn the meaning of Christmas.
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What critics compared A Charlie Brown Christmas to
Who woulda thunk that Yarrow Cheney and Scott Mosier, the latest filmmakers to big-screen Dr. Seuss’s Yuletide classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, would find equal if unspoken inspiration from another holiday perennial, A Charlie Brown Christmas?
As Matt Zoller Seitz has observed, Wes Anderson is a big fan of Peanuts — especially A Charlie Brown Christmas — and all of his characters can remind us of Charlie Brown or other characters in that community.
Music is eclectic from a "Hey Jude" cover to selections from "A Charlie Brown Christmas."
The music (he remains fond of lilting '60s British invasion plus "A Charlie Brown Christmas"), production design and cinematography (by repeat Anderson collaborators David Wasco and Robert Yeoman, respectively) put you in a time and place governed by their own rules.
Animation and jazz have always had a symbiotic relationship – Joe’s piano rhapsodies sound like the wayward relations of Vince Guaraldi’s score for A Charlie Brown Christmas .
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First-time feature director Peter Ramsey (a longtime storyboard artist) delivers a series of absolutely stunning set pieces and painstakingly detailed tableaux that make the movie a visual feast, but its willfully blinkered secular message is a mess, and a serious miscalculation: Unlike the classic TV specials "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "A Charlie Brown Christmas," which demonstrated that the significance of Christmas transcends material goods, this movie tells us that if kids don't get toys and colored eggs, they stop believing, and Christmas and Easter die.
Hiding under Carl's suddenly airborne porch is Russell (Jordan Nagai), an indomitable Wilderness Explorer Scout who looks like a thumb and sounds like the missing Asian cast member of A Charlie Brown Christmas.