The Complete Peanuts Family Album. Andrew Farago

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      I

      went as Charlie Brown for Halloween this past year.

      At age fifty-six, I got a few sideways glances. My beard

      and glasses with my Charlie Brown bald wig made me look

      more like Sigmund Freud Charlie. But I didn’t care. The

      whole universe of Peanuts characters that Schulz created is

      sacred to me. I remember being in my pajamas as a four-

      year-old watching the Christmas special when it first ran

      on TV. I read every Peanuts book I could. I identified with

      Charlie Brown’s insecurities. I was amazed at the secret,

      adventurous world of Snoopy. I was inspired by the spiri-

      tuality of Linus and that he could endure the fussbudgetry

      of Lucy! I coughed on the sidewalk and then stomped on

      the germs. Schulz’s work is in my artistic DNA now. He has

      many lessons for us.

      Peanuts is such an interesting mix of emotional angst

      and surrealism. Somehow the two go together. Who among

      us hasn’t felt that the world becomes surreal during times

      of angst? I’ve taken that Schulzian idea into my cartooning

      and animation career, which includes twenty-three years as

      a story artist and screenwriter at Pixar.

      In graduate school at Purdue University, I drew a

      daily four-panel strip called Loco Motives for the Purdue

      Exponent Newspaper. There, I was exploring the angst of

      university life but overlaid with a surreal set of characters

      including a herbivorous plains-dwelling antelope who just

      happened to live with two dudes on campus. Blitzen, as I

      called him, could talk, and his antlers (much like Snoopy’s)

      could reshape and reflect his emotions. There was no

      reason for putting this character in, but I was inspired by

      how Snoopy’s surreal world of flying aces and bowling

      alleys in his dog house paired nicely with a normal round-

      headed boy who found the world mean and indecipherable.

      This duality also inspired me on movies like Up, which

      is a mix of the grief of Carl Fredriksen and the surrealism

      of talking dogs (“Squirrel!”). The two balance and clarify

      each other. It seemed like the lower we took Carl in grief,

      the more outlandish we could go with Dug and the rest of

      the dog pack. Carl’s grief stood out in stark contrast. His

      character was clear.

      Which is another Schulz lesson: clarity and contrast of

      character—we all know what Lucy or Schroeder or Sally

      would say or do in any situation. It’s what we in storytelling

      grapple with, and I am daily inspired by Schulz’ mastery of

      it. In Monsters, Inc., we spent a lot of time at the beginning

      just trying to define how Mike Wazowski would contrast

      Sulley. As an exercise, we put them in a situation of two

      roommates picking out a tie for Sully to go out for the

      evening. Mike fell into the role of the quick-tempered

      smart aleck; Sulley was more clear-headed and controlled.

      Each of the Peanuts characters had this—a clear personality

      type. But it is when Schulz puts them in contrast with other

      “side” characters that we get to see their depth. Linus’s

      religious zealotry is put to the test in the Great Pumpkin

      patch by Sally. The little red-haired girl, whom we never

      see (a little red herring), brings out the romantic side in

      Charlie Brown. Without her, we only see the insecure

      Charlie. And on and on . . . Schulz created a world of

      characters in which contrast of the side characters clarified

      the main characters.

      I am thankful every day that Schulz created this world

      and left a legacy of lessons for storytellers, and now I’m

      pondering next year’s costume.

      Most of us familiar with Charles M. Schulz’s artwork recog-

      nize it from the 17,897 Peanuts comic strips he wrote and

      drew over his fifty-year career. And much of that artwork has

      been used and modified in a variety of media for almost as

      long, filtered through animation, commercial design, print,

      and character licensing across the world. The artwork pre-

      sented in The Complete Peanuts Family Album comes from

      an array of sources and a diverse group of artists, including

      designers from Peanuts Worldwide (PW) and Charles M.

      Schulz Creative Associates (CSCA); some items come from

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