YMMV / A Boy Named Charlie Brown

• Accidental Nightmare Fuel: The bizarre Beethoven sequence. Impressive on an artistic level, but the Medium Blending can be a bit unsettling, especially if you're a kid.
• Awesome Music: The score got an Oscar nomination after all, so yes. See here for some examples.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Since it was the first full-length Peanuts movie, several standalone sequences were added to help fill the 86-minute runtime, including Schroeder playing a Beethoven sonata and Snoopy skating at Rockefeller Center.
• Heartwarming Moments: See here.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Linus telling Charlie Brown "You'll either be a hero or a goat." Come the late 2010's / early 2020's, this becomes interpreted as "You'll either be a hero or the Greatest Of All Time".
• Memetic Mutation: This is the origin of Peter Robbins' (the voice of Charlie Brown at the time) famous recording of "AAUGH!", which was reused for multiple Peanuts specials, not only for Charlie Brown but for other characters, including female characters.
• Misaimed Fandom: Several fans have wished that Charlie Brown won the National Spelling Bee, completely ignoring that the main moral of the movie and the comic strip is that even if you're the world's greatest underachiever, life still goes on.
• Padding: Most of the instrumental musical sequences are this. See Big-Lipped Alligator Moment above.
• Tear Jerker: While not as soul-crushing as Snoopy, Come Home, the whole movie has a pretty melancholic tone. The basic plot is Charlie Brown dealing with the unrelenting misery and failure that is his life, getting a Hope Spot when he gets a chance at a regional spelling bee, and returning in disgrace after he loses.
• Unintentional Period Piece: A minor one. When Linus is describing what he sees in the clouds, he mentions "British Honduras". You probably know it today as Belize (the name changed in 1973).
• Values Dissonance: The African American boy in the spelling bee is drawn with obvious lips (Franklin, who had been introduced to the strip a year prior, was never depicted as such), unlike the white characters. In later years, such an artistic decision would be unlikely, to say the least. The Asian girl's similarly stereotypical character design has also been known to rub viewers from later eras the wrong way.
• Values Resonance: Charlie Brown's symptoms come off as clinical depression — something still just as relevant literally fifty years after its creation.^note Charles Schulz suffered this, which is why A Charlie Brown Christmas is about holiday depression long before it became classified itself.
• The Woobie:
  • Oh, God, Charlie Brown. The whole movie will have you wanting to give him a hug.
  • It's also hard not to feel sorry for Linus without his blanket (which he gave to Charlie Brown, before the latter left for the spelling bee).

---