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Peanuts: As a lifelong fan of the Peanuts comic strip and television specials

As a lifelong fan of the Peanuts comic strip and television specials,
Steve Martino says that getting chosen to direct
a computer-animated Peanuts movie struck him as “a huge responsibility.”
 When he accepted the offer, he knew the importance of staying true to the
original work that cartoonist Charles Schulz created, starting in 1950.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Charles Schulz as an artist,” Martino told TFK.
“He was like a teacher to me. When I was very young, I would read the comic strip with my dad.
I used to just lie on the floor and stare at the drawings. I think the Peanuts characters were
 some of the first characters I tried to draw or copy.”

Though Charles Schulz died in 2000, his family has been passionate about preserving his
legacy and making sure children today can enjoy the Peanuts crew. His son Craig and
grandson Bryan worked as two of the three writers on The Peanuts Movie, which comes to
 theaters on November 6. While the Schulz family worked hard to keep the characters
authentic, Martino had a special kind of balancing act: bringing the Peanuts gang to
life with computer animation while staying true to the original two-dimensional artwork.


“I thought that with computer animation there would be the opportunity to bring these characters to
 life and make [their] world feel a little more real,” he said. “But it was very important to me
that we find the ‘pen line’—the way that Charles Schulz drew.”
Longtime Peanuts fans will notice the signature pen line in almost every detail:
the squiggle of Charlie Brown’s mouth,
the way movement is shown with motion lines, and even the outline of Snoopy’s doghouse.

In addition to following Schulz’s pen line, Martino had the
film’s casting director listen to thousands of recordings to
choose actors who sound like the original Peanuts characters from TV.
And thanks to archived recordings of Bill Melendez, the director of
the original Peanuts animated films and voice of Snoopy,
the lovable beagle sounds exactly the same.

“It creates a wonderful [connection] to who Snoopy
has always been through all of the animated specials,”
Martino said.
This attention to detail required extra hours of
work for the film’s crew, but Martino thinks it
was worth it. “We took a tremendous amount of
care in the making of the movie because we have
 such respect for the work that [Schulz] created,”
he said. “And as we studied more of his work,
we developed even more respect for how he has touched
people around the world.
My hope is that he would be proud of what we’ve created.

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