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s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 5 c g w 9 ranslate Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" comic strip into a 3D animated feature? Easy peasy, right? Indeed, that's what many on the crew at Blue Sky Studios thought. These artists had simu- lated dozens of furry creatures in Ice Age and created Epic's com- plex environments. Surely anyone would consider that for these artists, the process of creating Charlie Brown's modest shape and his unfussy neighborhood would be as simple as a peanut butter sandwich. Lead Character Designer Sang Sung Lee sums up a typi- cal reaction: "Someone said to me, 'You did character design? So, what did you do? The char- acters are already designed.' " And therein lies the problem. As everyone on the crew soon learned, moving a classic comic strip into the 3D world in a way that preserves everyone's mem- ory of the comic and the 2D television specials, while at the same time meets the expec- tations of modern audiences familiar with 3D animated films, is neither simple nor easy. Steve Martino, who had di- rected Fox/Blue Sky's animated film version of Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who, directed The Pea- nuts Movie. He, Producer Michael Travers, and others on the Blue Sky crew worked with the Schulz family, the Schulz museum staff, and the artists at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates in Santa Rosa, California, on the film's story and visual develop- ment. Schulz's son Craig, his grandson Bryan, and Cornelius Uliano wrote the script. "We logged a lot of hours traveling to Santa Rosa," Martino says. "As we developed the story, we'd think of ideas, gags, things the characters might do. This is a 2015 feature film. We couldn't have two talking heads. We needed more physical storytell- ing. Not backflips, but emo- tional moments and feelings expressed through the way a character moves. Craig under- stands his father's Peanuts universe very deeply. He'd tell us when we crossed the line." Craig Schulz also came to Blue Sky to help the development team master the visual lines. "When we first got the project, our initial reaction was gleeful," says Art Director Nash Dunnigan. "The characters were already designed. We had lots of the world designed. Well, it turned out it wasn't so easy. When we built our first hero models and sent them around, the reaction was, "Eww. You totally missed our memory of who they are." R A T S ! Thus, Dunnigan gave a group of artistic and technical supervisors the chore of finding the best version of each character, a task complicated by the comic strip's longevity. Schulz published his first "Peanuts" comic strip in 1950. His last appeared hours aer he died in February 2000. "The supervisors discovered there was an evolution in Sparky's style," Dunnigan says, using Schulz's well-known nickname. "Snoopy went from quadruped to biped. In the '60s, the characters' head shape was like a windshield, with eyes high on their faces, which would have been easier for us. But in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, the eyes migrated to the sides of the heads. When a character looks at us from the front, we're actually looking at it from the side, like a Picasso head." The more the team talked with cartoonist Paige Braddock, the creative director at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates who oversees products related to Peanuts licensing, the more they settled on the Peanuts family as drawn in the '80s and '90s. "We call it the classic period," Dunnigan says. "We had the supervisors bring us models for each character from that period, starting with Snoopy – facing right, sitting, walking, standing. As a group, we voted on the best pieces and parts, and combined them into a FrankenSparky. When we saw it, we sighed. That was our best version of Snoopy. We knew that if we all agreed, prob- ably the fan base in the world would, too." The team applied the same process to each character, cre- ating hero models from pieces and parts that received the most votes. "That shape was the begin- ning of the process," Dunnigan says. "Then to get the CG version of what Charlie Brown looks like took another year and a half." Adds Lee, "The benefit of 3D is that we can create characters more believable to the audience than 2D characters. If you look at Horton (in Horton Hears a Who), any angle in 3D works. But the Peanuts characters change shape with every angle. And, the mouth shape looks like a pen line." According to Dunnigan, they tried lots of versions of eyes and hair. "We balanced colors. We tried to be faithful to the graphic pen line," he says. "When Steve [Martino] said, 'We're going to commit to the graphic look,' we breathed a sigh of relief. We weren't going to 'upgrade' the look. But we knew it would be technically difficult to get a pen line to work in 3D CG. Sparky was so economical and sparse in the way he drew lines. We had to find out what that meant sculpturally." The artists had to make the CG characters' shape changes and pen lines credible to immerse them in a believable 3D world. G O O D G R I E F ! It fell to the character devel- opment team – Character T (TOP) WHEN TRANSLATING SCHULZ'S DRAWINGS INTO 3D CHARAC- TERS, ARTISTS STARTED FIRST WITH SNOOPY. (BOTTOM) IT TOOK 18 MONTHS TO CREATE THE CG VERSION OF CHARLIE BROWN.