It Was My Best Birthday Ever, Charlie Brown!

Plot synopsis:
The special begins with Linus roller-skating all over town. On his way back from a birthday party, he passes by a garden where he hears someone singing ("O Mio Babbino Caro") As he enters the garden, he learns that a little girl named Mimi is the person that was singing. After Linus and Mimi spend time gardening together, Linus invites her to his birthday party which she accepts.
Linus keeps hearing Mimi's singing voice everywhere he goes and can't seem to stop thinking about her. As Linus is writing his guest list for his birthday party, Lucy asks who Mimi is. After Linus tells her, Lucy thinks that it's ridiculous that Linus is inviting a girl that he just met and thinks Mimi will not show up, but Linus is positive that she will.
On the day of Linus' birthday party, Linus wonders where Mimi could be. When Lucy and Sally bring out Linus' birthday cake lights the candles & everybody starts singing "Happy Birthday" to him, Linus tries to get them to stop, but to no avail. As soon as everybody finishes singing, Linus hears Mimi singing "Happy Birthday" from outside. After Mimi finishes singing to Linus, she gives him a flower and a kiss. At first, Linus is sad when Mimi has to leave, but he later starts dancing along with everyone else.
The end of the special shows Linus talking to Charlie Brown about if he'll ever see Mimi again and Woodstock shows up, whistling the song that Mimi sang.

Tags: psychedelic

Review:
Certainly not up to the standard of earlier specials.
I really did not like this video.
The music was corny and the characters did not act like themselves.
The sole redeeming feature was that they got a child who could actually sing, to do the bit with the singing.
By the way, in case you're wondering (I was), I went and looked it up and the name of that song is "O Mio Babbino Caro" -- it's by Puccini..
Sigh..
As a lifelong "Peanuts" fan, I'd like to honestly say every "Peanuts" special is an animated classic.
Unfortunately, "It Was My Best Birthday Ever, Charlie Brown!" proves I can't.
Without being too repetitive of the other reviews, the production quality is poor, the plot is extremely thin, and the music pales in comparison to most other "Peanuts" specials.
That it was a straight-to-video release is no surprise.
The first third of the program is probably the weakest part, as it does essentially nothing to advance the plot and is actually rather difficult to follow.
On a positive note, the voice work is solid, especially the singing, and the gags with Snoopy and Woodstock are amusing.
If you're a "Peanuts" completist like me you'll still want to watch it, and fortunately as of this writing you can find "It Was My Best Birthday Ever, Charlie Brown!" on YouTube..
Bad. I agree with the other reviewers.
This was an extremely bad Peanuts special.The first seven minutes was taken up entirely with an entirely wordless montage of Linus roller blading, and then Linus at a party.
We then see Sally and Charlie Brown have a brief discussion and then another few wordless minutes of Linus skating and exploring a garden.
By now about half the special is over.It is very boring, there are almost no jokes, and the characterization is not well done.Stick with the specials done up until the early 80s..
This was not the best special ever, Charlie Brown.
"It Was My Best Birthday Ever, Charlie Brown" is a shallow attempt to restore the fading art of the Peanuts TV specials.
Although it hit the mark in cuteness and charm, it failed to present any of the deeper meanings and characterization present in Schulz' comic strip or the other specials.
In fact, it doesn't present much of anything at all.
Half of the 25-minute cartoon is taken up by an uncharacteristically bold and independent Linus skating through town with hip inline skates.
This scene was animated rather well, with nice 3D moving backgrounds and a fairly realistic-moving Linus, who looks rotoscoped.
How do you rotoscope the actions of a huge-headed cartoon kid with a real person?
You can't, not very well anyway, as the discerning eye will notice Linus' limbs stretching and bending in odd locations.
Yet this is the best animation in the special, and the filmmakers know this well as they opt to play the entire sequence twice, with the same music and even the same scenes.
The rest of the animation is not even on a par with the substandard low-budget cartooning present in the 60's and 70's Peanuts films.
The entire production looks like it was done in Shockwave Flash.
Many characters have an anti-aliasing problem which makes them look like they are sticking out of the scenery instead of blending with it.
Characters will move towards and away the camera through a simple sprite enlargement technique, which looked pretty high-tech on the Super Nintendo but sticks out like a sore thumb in feature animation.
When they want to zoom in the camera, they just crop and enlarge the image, which makes the film very blurry.
They might as well have just cut to a close-up shot.
The kids at the party run on a loop of about three frames each, as they flap their mouths and clap their hands in unison.
Where did Linus get all these many friends anyway?
And why are there *gasp* adults in the picture?All complaints about the animation aside, the story is pretty cute, but not up to par with other Peanuts specials.
Linus stumbles into a garden while riding his rollerblades and meets Mimi, an operatic child diva that can actually sing (anyone who heard the kids sing in "Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown" will thank the movie at least for this).
Mimi is a gardening prodigy as well, and spends several minutes dispensing encyclopedic botanical wisdom to Linus, such as the fact that digitalis, the heart medicine, is extracted from the foxglove plant.
Linus is instantly smitten with the girl, as she is the first girl he's ever met who tolerates him without being abusive or overly clingy.
Linus then invites her to his upcoming birthday party, and she tentatively agrees.
He then spends the next half of the program agonizing about whether or not Mimi will show up to his party, even though any reason why she can't or wont come is never quit e explained.
Nevertheless, the question here is not whether or not she will come, and *** SPOILER SPOILER *** she does (big surprise), but how she will break his heart in the end.
Needless to say it was all very anti-climactic, not even reaching the amount of pathos invoked by the Little Red-Haired Girl in "A Charlie Brown Valentine" (2002) and Melody-Melody in "You're In the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown" (1993), or for that matter Linus' own unrequited "love"--the Great Pumpkin, who never fails to disappoint Linus every Halloween.
There isn't even any requisite cruelty from Lucy or Peppermint Patty to liven things up.
There wasn't even any cool Vince Guaraldi jazz music, having been replaced by some guy on a synthesizer busting out crappy hip-hop beats that should have been buried with Vanilla Ice.
I almost expected the Peanuts cast to bust out into a "cool" kiddie rap like those clean-cut child stars in "Camp Cucamonga" (1990)--"Yo, I'm Linus, and I'm here to say/I'm passive-aggressive in a major way..."
In the end, I think I have said more about this half-hour made-for-video cartoon than most people write about Oscar winning movies.
Nevertheless, it is worth a rental for kids and for the devoted Peanuts fan.
It's not all that bad..
Pretty bad.
My little girl (aged 2) is mildly obsessed with Peanuts and this is one of her favourites...because Linus skates in it.
That's the good news.For anyone who enjoys Peanuts for story and characterisation, well, this special is a real low point.I've watched it about 10 times now.
IMO this special was not completed as intended.
Maybe they ran out of money?
They take shortcuts everywhere to pad out the running time: There is the skating scene which is repeated twice, this takes up nearly 6 minutes of running time.
So desperate where they to pad out time that they repeat scenes within the repeated scenes...or they must have a lot of banks in that area for Linus to skate past.
A party Linus attends, without bringing a present for the host, looks like scenes cobbled together from Linus's birthday party later in the episode.
This leads to a glaring continuity error, Charlie Brown is at the early party and dressed like he was at the latter party, but then he asks his sister what the party was like.
I didn't realise he was that forgetful!
A kitchen in the house Linus has his party keeps from one side of the house to another.
Linus is missing his blanket when skating, then has it back again...You get the idea.
Animations in the dancing scenes are directly lifted from 'It's Spring training Charlie Brown', but done about half as well.The plot is wafer thin.
Linus falls in love with a girl who's house he breaks into.
In another padded out sequence Linus creeps through the gardens of the girls home like a stalker.
She welcomes Linus warmly despite his trespassing and then she starts talking, a lot.
In a short time frame we find out she has he voice of an angel, likes to espouse Chinese proverbs and has an encyclopedic understanding of horticulture and it uses in modern medicine.
Yes, she's a know it all.Despite this, Linus then invites her to his birthday.
She makes him wait for her arrival, then when she does arrive she doesn't come inside, she drives past and gives him a flower.
Yeah, she's definitely a keeper...Children may love it, but adults will not.
There are many far superior Peanuts specials and movies, try those instead.