Yesterday, this trailer for next year’s Peanuts movie debuted.

And I just don’t know where to start. No, wait. Yes, I know where to start. I know exactly where to start: That song. I don’t know where the fuck someone summoned up the lack of moral fortitude to try to segue Vince Guaraldi’s theme into…whatever that terrible pop-rock song is, but whoever made that decision needed to be told “no” more often as a child. Nothing says “World War I flying ace” more than a cheesy 90s-style song about liking someone a whole lot!

I don’t mind the 3D-ification of Charles Schulz’s artwork as much as I thought I would. If you’re going to animate Schulz’s style, you’re already violating the stillness and simplicity of his line. And so this is a cheerful violation that makes some minor nods to the source material, which is about the best you can hope for in an adaptation like this. None of this looks like Schulz drew it, but some of it looks like a tracing of Schulz, and, well, that’s OK. Blue Sky is the maker of mediocre films (Horton Hears a Who, the Ice Age franchise) and so the fact that they even try to mimic Schulz at all is a surprising treat. Their Seuss adaptations have exactly none of the charm of his illustrations; this trailer at least looks like they know that what they’re trying to adapt has some charm.

It’s worrisome that so much of trailer is taken up with Snoopy, but that’s the nature of adaptations, too. Snoopy is visually dynamic, has cute sidekicks, and has none of the sadness of the rest of Peanuts. It’s natural that Hollywood would focus on him. The thing that really bothered me about the trailer was the scene in the end where Charlie Brown fumbles his popcorn and spills it everywhere and everyone laughs at him. It’s such a simple-minded reading of Charlie Brown’s loserdom. It’s the Alanis Morissette-style “Ironic” of Charlie Brown fuckups: “I spilled everything everywhere! This bucket landed on my head! How embarrassing!” A good Charlie Brown mess-up hints at greatness or kindness or thoughtfulness, but then reality clambers into the way. A Charlie Brown who can’t even walk to his seat without spilling his popcorn for no reason isn’t a sympathetic Charlie Brown. It would be more characteristic if he was buying malted milk balls to share with his friends but they all melted into one single rock of gray chocolate, say, or he passed the bag of popcorn down the aisle for everyone to share and the bag never came back. A Charlie Brown movie that can’t capture the idea that melancholy arrives paired with aspiration isn’t a Charlie Brown movie at all.