A Boy Named Charlie Brown (G)
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This is the first feature film based on the "Peanuts" comic strip. It came out in 1969 (six years before I was born), but I don't believe I ever saw it until I watched it on Hulu in 2022. I kind of feel like the rating I've given it is slightly generous, but the next rating down would be too stingy. (There must be other things I've rated one smiley that I liked more than this.) I wasn't wild about the story or anything, though some of the animation in a few scenes was... interesting. And for a little while I was worried that the movie would just be a series of unrelated sketches, but luckily I was (mostly) wrong about that. There were some things that seemed pretty random, though.

Well, Charlie Brown fails at a number of things, including losing a baseball game, and gets discouraged that he can't do anything right. And he gets some really bad psychiatric "help" from Lucy, including once again pulling the football away before he can kick it. (How that has anything to do with psychiatry, I won't even get into.) Anyway, pretty much everyone except Linus treats him like crap. One day some kids jokingly suggest entering the school's spelling bee, which Linus genuinely encourages. To everyone's surprise, he wins, and he starts feeling confident. So kids start treating him well, for a change. (Which kind of reminded me of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.) Then he has to go to the nationals (which seemed a pretty quick escalation, to me). Linus lends him his blanket as a good luck charm, which he later regrets. So he and Snoopy go to the city (apparently New York) where the spelling bee is being held to try to get his blanket back. Incidentally, I found it rather disturbing that such young kids were allowed to just take the bus to another city and stay in a hotel by themselves. But whatever. Um... I don't want to say how the spelling bee turns out, or really anything else about the plot. I'm glad I finally watched it, but it's not something I can manage to care much about, and I probably won't find it very memorable.