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Storyboards for A Charlie Brown Christmas (courtesy of the book A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition ) The budget was so small that the team went $20,000 over that amount - and still had less than half the money of the first animated Christmas special, Mr. A Charlie Brown Christmas was animated in four months, and was allotted a tiny budget of $76,000 (around $660,000 today). You feel like you can’t draw worth a darn when you work on those characters. Many people wouldn’t say that, but just let them sit down and try to draw those guys, and they’ll find out. We sit here and draw Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and characters like that with no problem, but to draw Schulz’s characters took a talent unto itself. Animator Dale Baer, a Disney legend from projects like The Lion King, put it like this: They were idiosyncratic designs, unique to him. “When we saw the finished show,” recalled director Bill Melendez, “we thought we had killed it.” 1īill Littlejohn, an animator on the special, once said, “The Peanuts characters were not designed for animation.” Schulz hadn’t broken them down into easy-to-draw shapes.
#A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS HOW TO#
Seeing Charles Schulz’s characters in motion may feel natural now, but figuring out how to animate them was a challenge that the team almost didn’t overcome. It didn’t appear out of thin air, fully formed - the magic was crafted by human hands. We’re all so close to A Charlie Brown Christmas, though, that it’s easy to miss its qualities as a work of animation. Although it first aired in 1965, the whole thing feels timeless. The show is tender, funny and meaningful in all the right ways. It’s not just a great Christmas special - it’s the greatest Christmas special. A Charlie Brown Christmas deserves its reputation.