Review of A Boy Named Charlie Brown

I'm conflicted about this film. It has a great score, some nice original songs, and hits a bunch of the classic Peanuts gags like Charlie Brown flying a kite, playing baseball, going to psychiatrist Lucy, trying to kick that football that Lucy would always pull away at the last second, as well as Snoopy dreaming of flying his doghouse in an aerial battle with the Red Baron and a very surreal animated sequence where Schroeder is playing Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13, commonly known as Sonata Pathétique. I was also amused by Linus' drug-addict like withdrawal symptoms when he is without his blanket for an extended period of time. The kid had a serious flannel addiction. The downside, for me, was based around the nominal plot of the movie outside of hitting the standard tropes, which was Charlie Brown qualifying for and going to the National Spelling Bee. The majority of the words Charlie gets are very negative (failure, fussbudget, etc.) which gets the standard teasing from the kids "Of course he can spell failure", etc. The worst part of it comes down to him winning his class, his school, and going to Nationals where **SPOILER ALERT** He comes in 2nd place, losing on a pretty easy word he totally should have known how to spell (beagle, they kind of dog Snoopy is). At this point, the film falls onto the very American attitude that you can come in 2nd place at the National level and because you didn't come in 1st you are a piece of trash loser. This reinforces his loser-ness and he comes back into town in the dead of night to zero accolades, when he should have rightly been lauded for climbing to 2nd place at the National level...but that would have gone against type for his "affable loser" character. A terrible example for kids though, if you don't win, you suck. Well worth seeing for Peanuts fans & completists who have not seen it before, but it definitely needs to go along with a context setting discussion if you bring a little kids to see it.