Featuring the voices of Noah Schnapp and Bill Melendez. Rated G. Now playing.

If the thought of watching Charlie Brown failing to kick a football in 3-D has you saying, “Good grief!”, don't worry: the makers of this new ode to Charles M. Schulz’s lovable loser take pains to respect its past.

For starters, the digitally generated images have hand-drawn expressions that hark back to the comic strip and its various retro-television specials—the squiggle frowns and smirks. There is the quintessential jazz piano soundtrack. And the film is set in a pre-Internet, pre-global warming, pre-Prozac world where there are typewriters, snow days, and five-cent psychiatry sessions with Lucy. Most retro of all, no adults appear to be giving any supervision anywhere, save for the wah-wah of the teacher’s voice. And yes, Charlie Brown is still suffering premature baldness, and his closet is full of the famous zig-zag yellow-and-black shirts.

In fact the gently funny The Peanuts Movie works more as a charming homage to the famous scenes of the TV classics It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Christmas for adult viewers than as an iconic movie for a new generation. That’s mostly because the main plot is lame, centring on Charlie Brown’s first crush—the woefully underdeveloped “little red-haired girl” who’s the new kid in class. Cue more than an hour of Charlie Brown working up the courage to speak to her, his famously low self-opinion plumbing pathetic new depths. (When it starts to drag you can ponder why he wouldn’t be more attracted to Peppermint Patty, with her wicked slapshot and voice straight from the boudoir of Demi Moore.)

Thankfully, Schulz-like tangents keep things rolling along. A talent show goes wonkily awry and the Red Baron keeps roaring out of nowhere in his vintage plane.

About the closest the film gets to Schulz’s wise if somewhat dated genius is a sequence where Charlie Brown has to do a book report on War and Peace. Several dozen recipe cards, balls of string, and exploding ink later, you’ll have a new respect for the beleaguered character—and for an animated film that would dare to make an extended Tolstoy joke in this hyperactive day and age.