I thought this was going to be the sequel, why bother with a remake? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the obvious bump in quality, the backgrounds are immaculate & beautiful, the scene with Schroeder was massively enhanced from the original, & the scene where Charlie actually kills Lucy is much better, it was more fitting than the cleaver & better animated too. I know what it's like to feel dissatisfied with the quality of an animation you worked one a few years ago & wanting to perfect it, but some aspects are actually worse than in the original.
Take for example the panned shot of the moon when Lucy is murdered, in the original it was a crescent moon surrounded by clouds & it was very well done & tastefully arranged. In this new version, you used a full moon, but it looks horrible. You didn't even draft craters into it like you did in Charlie Brown Murders, you took the Brush tool, set the alpha to a low percentage and covered a yellow circle in transparent brown smears focused near the center. Sometimes recycling some of your older assets isn't the worst choice.
Other changes also felt unnecessary. In the remade scene with Schroeder, you added a fireplace, catalog-tier furniture and it's all excellently designed, but it feels like it's overdone. One of the more important nuances of Peanuts was that it was largely down to earth, pedestrian even, & you captured that quite well, I thought. It feels like you lost sight of that aspect for the sake of technical superiority, which you achieved but it just feels a bit hollow by comparison. That center shot of the Beethoven bust had a poignancy to it, everything felt balanced and just right from a tonal perspective. More practically speaking, Schroeder lives in a house in the suburbs, not an eighteenth century mansion, you feel me?
Speaking of tone, I will admit that I do miss the Necro soundtrack, and I know you can't use it anymore but it did keep in with the unadulterated vengeful tone from Charlie Brown Murders, but now it's a purely classical soundtrack. The horrorcore soundtrack verses the classical helped put a divide between Charlie's worldview and how the world is seen and felt by others, it really put it into perspective that Lucy, Schroeder & Linus live in a whole other world from Charlie, it framed his resolve & his outlook. I'm sure there are some royalty free horrorcore tracks out there somewhere, maybe even some here on NG.
The satanic undertones in the original IAMW Charlie Brown were interesting, but now it doesn't feel like he has genuine hate for Lucy at all & is driven just by insanity. You included the opening to Dance With The Devil at the end but made no references to Charlie's ties with the devil, the scene where he's scolded by a demon to murder Lucy was replaced by a nightmare of him being chased away by a tentacle version of himself. The imagery in that scene was so original and interesting, & I liked the puppet strings aspect of it, it added a layer of intrigue.
I don't get the change in direction to be honest, trying to make it more true to life without any of the occult themes feels like a letdown. I was really looking forward to a follow up to it, I felt like Dance With The Devil was very cleverly written & had lots of potential. I guess what I'm getting at is this; are there any plans to follow through on the Dance With The Devil plot thread or is that over?
I think it would've been better if you made the conclusion episode and packaged it with the remake as one video, because as it stands, it's like a Duke Nukem Forever situation where the follow up is promised for years and what we got is a re-imagined take of the original.
In a way, writing this all out and looking over it, remembering other people in similar boats like SqueakyToad & his Spirit of Halloween series and how that concluded, all has lit a fire under my own ass with my own unfinished business. I hope you read this and consider some of what I said.
Yours SINcerely
~Psychopath.