Stop Trying to Modernize The Smurfs

We recently received the newest attempt at a feature film adaptation of The Smurfs, the famed Belgian franchise by Peyo. Instead of Sony, we now have Paramount taking a swing at the IP, with director Chris Miller, the director behind Shrek the Third and the first Puss in Boots film. When you sit down and watch the trailer, you realize the big marketing pull for this film is famed pop star Rihanna, the newest pop star since Katie Perry and Demi Lovato to be the voice for Smurfette. Then the real trailer rolls out and the animation looks good. It’s a mix of CGI with 2D details, and it looks like we are going the route of the 2017 film, while staying strictly in the medium of animation. Yeah, the casual audience-pandering elements like pop music and dancing are gonna be in there no matter what, but it is off to a promising start. 

When, however, the dreaded sky portal appears, we see that at the very least, some part of the film is going to take place in the live-action world. It’s not entirely known how much of the film will be in the human world, but along with the more casual audience-pandering elements of the film with the music, the dialogue sounding more modern than timeless, and the constant need to take cartoon characters from the 60s-80s and put them into the real world with live-action humans for some reason or another, it started to grind my gears. It made me yell with every fiber of my being that Hollywood executives need to stop modernizing The Smurfs.

Yes, you can connect this to every other adaptation of cartoons from your parent’s childhood that got the live-action treatment. Doing this took out any of the charms from said franchise to make it, well, I guess more palatable for the four-quadrant audiences. This is odd because The Smurfs was already a highly popular franchise with multimedia projects like games, shows, movies, specials, and so on. It feels silly to try and modernize it when you were already going to get the audiences that would show interest in this. Pop culture IPs like The Smurfs are popular among multiple age ranges whether they are kids or adults. Forcing a square block in a circular hole is just more work than it really should be for something as simple as little blue magic folks in a medieval world. 

You must think that so many studios trying to force modernization on deliberately old-school IP makes the final products sound terrible, but it’s true! Rarely did any of the “bring your favorite cartoons to the real world” films do anything to keep the charm of their source material in the final product. Maybe, some got away with it like Josie and the Pussycats with its focus on the current music industry of that year or Rocky and Bullwinkle’s absurd bits of comedy, but a diamond in a vast sea made out of lumps of coal doesn’t excuse the fact that it has become a real hollow attempt to modernize an old IP for modern audiences since they fear audiences won’t connect with it. 

If there is a reason a generation doesn’t know or care about an old IP like The Smurfs or their underwater brethren The Snorks, then maybe don’t invest millions into a possibly doomed project. They don’t have to try to modernize it for a new generation, and make it as painfully hip as possible, instead of letting the charm or whatever charm was there for the old IP speak for itself. There is a reason why folks have reacted strongly to Bumblebee and Transformers One, and less to the Michael Bay originals. Those two films had creatives that made sure you got the appeal of the IP and made sure to craft a story first, over doing every single familiar trope and gag by bringing characters from an old show/world to the modern day. It’s more baffling when it comes to adapting something like The Smurfs. 

The franchise is known for its timeless whimsy and magical world. There were even some episodes of the original show that were creepy for younger audiences. The 2017 film, while having some modern gags, still fits into the world of The Smurfs. They kept it in a world where you didn’t need to worry about other human characters outside of Gargamel. 

This movie is giving Gargamel a brother and they are fully animated in motion and design. The funny thing is that the film looks like it doesn’t even fully take place in the real world, due to how it seems like there are just a few snippets and moments where they will be in there. Outside of the introduction of animated Smurfs that are in the human world for reasons unknown, you wonder why they needed to overcomplicate the plot like this. 

A lot of great fantasy films from the 80s relied on the world and magic of the film to bring you in. It wasn’t pulling you in because it had a famous singer. It wanted you to feel like you were in a genuine magical world as it engrossed you in its harrowing adventure. There is a reason folks still talk about stuff like Dragonslayer, Willow, and 2023’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and it’s because they commit to the bit and keep you in its world of fantasy with no winks or nods to anything. It’s a fantasy story and adventure through and through. 

There is a reason why the 80s live-action Masters of the Universe and the upcoming He-Man movie got or are getting such negative press and reactions because they were so afraid that people would find their sci-fi fantasy settings ostracizing for some odd reason. People like He-Man because it’s a campy fun sci-fi fantasy franchise set in a cool dystopian sci-fi fantasy world with vibrant characters. That’s why folks have nostalgic-goggled love for the original series that isn’t technically good, but has its moments where they played with the world of its making. The early 2000s and the recent Kevin Smith-created Netflix series gave a more adult edge to the world so older kids to young adults could get into it, but were still able to keep some of the corny charm/comedy of the original. Even the other kid-focused Netflix CGI series had a more consistent tone that, while revamped to look cooler for new child-like audiences, still respected their intelligence while having some of the best comedy of the series. Seriously, Ben Disken as Skeletor has some of the funniest lines of any He-Man series. No one wants to see all that fun stuff stripped away so they can place them in New York or Ontario, which is pretending to be New York. 

Why do studios think we want to see Smurfs out of their magical environment, that, I assume they forgot, already had humans in it?! Sure, they might not be in the human world a whole lot, and so far, there has been no focus on advertising actual human characters who interact with the little blue folks. The fact they still decided to introduce this aspect of the story is a sign that the higher-ups at Paramount or any studio do not have faith that their audiences will accept a purely fantastical world. Granted, this is what happens when you have a bunch of artless, soulless, and inhuman Wall Street/Silicon Valley weirdos running these studios. They can see the success of something like the Paddington films, and then take the wrong idea away from them. People don’t like the Paddington films because they are full of real humans interacting with an animated realistic bear. People love those movies, because they offer charming whimsical stories that feel old-school in their dialogue and focus more on witty writing than worrying about being hip. They also have Paddington choosing kindness in his interacting and changing with the characters around him in a broken/found-family-style series of stories. 

Similarly, people don’t like The Smurfs because they interact with real-world humans, or the fact that something like Asterix and Obelix has all human characters. People like Asterix and Obelix, because it’s a funny and pun-driven fantasy world where our main characters do stuff like beat the tar out of the Roman Empire and/or whatever gets in their way via comedic shenanigans. The Smurfs are cute little fantasy characters doing their own little magical fantasy world stuff and have those moments where they encounter the unknown threats of Gargamel or the medieval world around them. 

This is a lot to think about over a teaser trailer, but when you have gone to other animated offerings in theaters like watching the fantastic Oscar-nominated shorts or the incredible grandiose epic feat of Chinese animation Nezha 2, a film that does a wonderful job at combining an epic fantasy story about how the deities/Gods want to control your destiny and how you live your life and your values with some dynamic action. It’s a film that, while having a first third that can lean a little too much on childish humor, respects you as an audience to handle scenes like the deities essentially wiping out an entire village of people in lava on screen or the internal drama of Nezha and his friend Ao Bing’s relationships to their parents and what fate has handed them. 

The Smurfs looks like everything filmgoers and folks hate about family entertainment and why animation doesn’t get taken seriously as a medium. It’s a sign of how little faith executives have in treating their audiences with respect and as thinking individuals. Could the final product be good and its mix of animation and live-action work? Possibly. It has a decent director behind it and the animation looks good, but the bar for a good Smurfs movie is so low that being just a three out of five will put you above the others. I’ll hope for the best when it comes out in July, but it’s safe to assume there will be plenty of films folks should support by that point in the year from big to small releases. We are just going to have to wait and see how it turns out.