1980 Week: Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!)

The last theatrical feature made during the original heyday of animated projects based upon Charles M. Shulz’s beloved Peanuts franchise, Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!) finds the franchise’s key creative team at low ebb. Schulz, who wrote and produced the picture, fails to deliver either a memorable narrative or strong jokes, and codirector Bill Melendez (a Peanuts veteran who shared helming chores on this project with Phil Roman) fails to provide the imaginative visual flourishes that make the deliberately crude artistic style of early Peanutscartoons so charming. In perhaps the most telling sign of creative fatigue, the storytellers feature adult characters onscreen, complete with dialogue, breaking the Peanuts spell of a universe created by and for children. Even Snoopy makes a poor showing here. While the forever-unlucky title character endures an eventful trip through Europe, his brilliant dog, Snoopy, acts like a menace, causing traffic accidents and dodging guard duty so he can slip off to a roadside bar for stiff drinks. (Snoopy favors root beer, but the effect is the same.) Whereas previous Peanuts movies have solid stories with bittersweet emotional payoffs, Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown feels trivial. Charlie Brown, Linus, Marcy, and Peppermint Patty venture to Europe as exchange students, taking Snoopy and his avian sidekick, Woodstock, along for the ride. In France, Charlie Brown visits a remote estate because he received a cryptic invitation, only to uncover a mystery with connections to his family. Neither the investigation nor the revelation it triggers is especially interesting. The movie also suffers for the inclusion of a lot more slapstick violence than usual; while the gags are gentle by normal standards, they seem harsh within the Peanuts sphere. After this disappointing film was released, Charlie Brown and the gang returned to their comfort zone of periodic TV specials until the release of a new, CGI-rendered feature, The Peanuts Movie, in 2015.

Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!): LAME

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