Tag: Charlie Brown

This year’s Halloween Movies

Dear Liza,

It is monster movie season, as usual. But with it also being a rather tense Election season here in the States, none of our household was feeling the need of adding more terror to the mix. So we have focused on animation, both drawn and stop-motion, for our Halloween entertainment.

I avoided “Hotel Transylvania” for years because it just looked too silly. But it is really fun. Dracula, a widower with a just-come-of-age daughter, has created a “safe space” for monsters, where they can vacation away from villagers with torches and pitchforks. There is also a nice culture clash storyline with a human fellow who wanders in. No gore, no stress, lots of fun animation and puns galore.

“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” has been Auntie Bridgett’s favorite her whole life. It is sweet, with Linus faithfully waiting in the pumpkin patch for his unorthodox hero to arrive. Every year, I get irritated at Lucy’s casual cruelty to Linus and Charlie Brown, only to see her redeem herself when she fetches her broken hearted little brother from the Pumpkin Patch and tucks him into bed.

Our choices are not all so lighthearted, though. Frankenweenie features a boy who uses his newly-acquired scientific knowledge to bring his dog back from the dead. This year, because we lost our dear Mousie, it felt sad and a little too close to home.

Paranorman, a stop motion animation created by Laika Studios here in Portland, is also a favorite. A little boy who sees (and is very polite to) ghosts is tasked with keeping the local witch spirit in her place. The crisis brings out the best in some and the worst in others, and the characters are delightfully quirky.

For me, the darkest of all the movies we watch is Coraline, also created by Laika Studios. The girl who wishes for a perfect world with attentive parents and fun activities gets what she asks for, and it takes help from a bossy cat and odd neighbor boy to get her out of it. Neil Gaiman wrote the original story, and it is wonderful, deep, and scary.

This is what we have been entertaining ourselves with these getting-darker evenings, as it gets too chilly for after dinner walks.

Have a wonderful weekend, stay warm, and we’ll chat later.

Love,

Grandma Judy

Happy 71st Anniversary, Peanuts!

Dear Liza,

This past Saturday was the 71st anniversary of the world-famous comic strip, Peanuts. We love Peanuts around here.

Snoopy’s pure joy, Charlie Brown’s stoic determination, and Linus’s loving faith touch our hearts. Auntie Bridgett admires Charles Schulz, the cartoonist who created the strip, for his ability to sum up the human condition so perfectly in just a few strokes of a pen.

To celebrate the day, we drank coffee from a Charlie Brown mug at breakfast and had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. After a busy day, we toasted Snoopy’s World War One flying ace with root beer in big fat mugs.

Later, we tried to watch the feature length film, “A Boy Named Charlie Brown”, which was made in 1971. I say we tried to watch it, and we made it about halfway through. But unlike the earlier Halloween and Christmas specials, this film couldn’t seem to find any joy for our hero. The characters harped on his failures, creating abusive scenes that seemed to go on forever and were painful to watch.

And when Charlie Brown did have some success, he was allowed to enjoy it for a scant minute on screen and was then back to the pit of despair. It was too much. We turned it off.

Still, we can’t let one movie spoil our joy of Peanuts. It was a good day and we will love Peanuts forever.

Love,

Grandma Judy