A Boy Named Charlie Brown

A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969) is the first Peanuts feature film you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Bill Melendez, who had helmed the TV specials since A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. Charles Schulz wrote the screenplay himself, and the leap from short-form to feature gives the story room to breathe in ways the specials never could.

Charlie Brown loses at everything. His kite finds the tree every time. His baseball team hasn't won in memory. Lucy pulls the football. But he wins his school spelling bee, which sends him — with Snoopy as unsolicited emotional support — to the national championship in New York City. The city scenes are a genuine tonal shift: the film gets quieter, stranger, more anxious than anything the TV specials attempted.

Animator Sherman Husley's abstract psychedelic sequences and Rod McKuen's score make this a 1969 artifact in the best sense. The ending is the most Schulz thing imaginable: it doesn't reward Charlie Brown with a trophy. It gives him something harder to argue with. Stream A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969) online on iFILM.