Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown

The Peanuts gang go away for summer camp and are split into tents to compete against one another. However one tent has won every year and cheap in every event. When the raft race comes each tent is out to win no matter what.

I like Peanuts the strip even if it is more melancholy than funny at times. However the animated films often lose much of what makes Charlie Brown Charlie Brown. The plot is quite simple and doesn't matter or make sense (why does the motorised raft seem to struggle to catch the others? Where's the supervision? Etc) but that is only to be expected.

What is important is that the Peanuts characters are true to form and most are just as you imagine them to be. The humour is a little more visual and slapstick than the comic strip and this takes some of the familiarity out of the film. However the themes of Charlie Brown being forever the loser is one that's well held to. The voices are pretty much as you'd expect them to be but the animation seems very basic at times and doesn't seem too large a step away from the strip.

Laughs are few but the overall feel of the film is similar to the feel of the strip. Overall this will please kids but maybe not those who are fans of the strip. Snoopy has plenty of good bits and the characters are all there but they have nothing out of the ordinary to do.