Nerds That Geek Movie Review - 'Smurfs: The Lost Village'

Written by Mike Cervantes

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Smurfs: The Lost Village. Also known as Columbia/Sony’s attempt to turn The Smurfs into a film franchise, Take 3…

So, unless you’ve understandably blocked it from your memory, Sony got their hands on the Smurfs franchise in 2011, with the release of The Smurfs, an immediate cash-in on the format created by 20th Century Fox’s lucrative Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise. The perceived concept was to take an animated cartoon from the 80’s, turn it CG, shoehorn it into a live action, modern day landscape, and send the cutsey kid’s characters on an adventure in audacity with a perfectly harmless lead actor (Neil Patrick Harris in these films) as the tour guide.

It worked well using Chipmunks because, despite the whole thing about CG, and live action, the premise wasn’t all too different. It failed spectacularly by using the Smurfs, though, because their bag was mostly about creating cutesy kid-friendly fantasy. Take them out of that environment, and you have generic blue elves romping around New York, being chased around by a prosthetic-faced Hank Azaria. It didn’t help the fact that the CG for the Smurfs was so ugly, it somehow triggered the uncanny valley for…short topless drowning victims, I guess.

Plans for this sequel were made public around 2014, when Sony started sending out in-production trailers of the film to news sites. They wanted to convey the message that this film was going to be as close to the memory of the original cartoon and comics as possible, and featured interviews with various animators gushing about fond memories of the Smurfs while showing off mounds of hand drawn artwork. Of course, this was still during a time when Sony pictures appeared to be a breakout star of the already crowded animated feature landscape. Pretty soon they’d hit a rock in the rapids when they’d announced the cancellation of a promising film featuring Popeye, and the falling out from that resulted in the resignation of Hotel Transylvania director Gennedy Tartakovsky, leaving us with only this film, and an upcoming film starring Emojis, to be the only ones that Sony Pictures Animation will be gracing us with in 2017.

So after all this is said and done, did Smurfs: The Lost Village succeed in smurfing us the nostalgic smurf we’ve smurfed for all this smurf? It does, but not very smurfily.

The movie assumes you know your Smurf-lore, if even to the extent it was used in the live action films. It centers on Smurfette, a character who was created from a ball of clay by Gargamel as a means to sabotage the Smurf Village. The Smurfs, having originated from a Belgium comic from the 60's, of course follows a group of three-apple tall blue elves who each possess a single definable trait, and, as a product of those times 'woman' just happened to be one of those traits. This film, like every other form of Smurf-product that moved forward from those times, tries to rectify this narrow-minded viewpoint by making Smurfette the most versatile character in the picture.

Here, she seems to be a jack of all trades, but feels remorseful that, unlike the other Smurfs, she doesn’t have just one particular thing that defines her. Add into that, the fact that the evil wizard Gargamel still perceives her as ‘doing her job’ in regards to foiling the other Smurfs, and you quickly realize her overall plight. This all changes one day when she sees another Smurf make a dash through a hole in an inexplicable wall in the middle of the woods. Against Papa Smurf’s wishes, she mounts an expedition into the forbidden forest, with the core group of high-profile Smurfs, Hefty, Brainy, and Clumsy, along for the ride. 

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Here it is assumed, once again from the live action movies, that we understand this is the core group of Smurfs, called 'Team Smurf' by Hefty. The obvious problem to this was that Hefty was barely in those films, replaced by a Scottish kilted stereotype named Gutsy. A few especially slapstick dashes through several enchanted set pieces, and the group finally finds themselves at The Lost Village, that turns out to be completely female, in contrast to the all-male village that we know from the series in general. They have come to warn the denizens about Gargamel, which obviously leads Gargamel directly to the village. There’s a third-act rescue, annnnnd….that’s about the entire film.

The one thing you have to keep in mind is that, unlike those live action predecessors, this film is doing the best it can to stick to its target demographic. There’s little, if any, nostalgic or parental bonuses to this film. It’s The Smurfs, as pure as the execution will allow. Still, even to that effect, there are a few strange choices made in this film. We only get this core group, Papa Smurf, and the new female Smurf villagers throughout. There’s only one throwaway line in 'smurf talk,' and Gargamel (Rainn Wilson) is noticeably more silly and slapstick, with a candor that more resembles a Will Ferrell character than the character he was in either of the live action movies.

The voice casting, once again, tries to be reminiscent of the live-action films, despite the use of all new actors. Mandy Patinkin (Papa Smurf), Demi Lovato (Smurfette), and Danny Pudi (Brainy Smurf), play the roles vacated by the late Jonathan Winters, Katy Perry, and Fred Armisen, and do so in a way that doesn’t stray from how they were done in that original film. It’s good then that a mass of the lines were passed to Hefty (Joe Manganiello), and Clumsy (Jack McBrayer). The true celebrity voice casting is on the Smurfs of the lost village, which boasts names like Julia Roberts as Smurf Willow, the matriarch/female equivalent to Papa Smurf, Michelle Rodriguez as Smurf Storm, the brave warrior, and Ellie Kemper as the Pinkie Pie-esque Smurf Blossom. Meghan Trainor is in there somewhere as well, but more notably she performs an especially 'girl-power' anthem for the final scene of the film. The stand-out, at least in the minds of the parents in the audience, is that Gargamel’s cat Azreal is once again being voiced by veteran VA Frank Welker, with other animal effects handled by American Dad’s Dee Bradley Baker.

The animation looks good; at all times appearing to be just below the line of any CG film this side of Disney or Pixar. The characters both look and act cartoony, often warping and blurring like hand-drawn characters do. It doesn’t give the all-out masquerading-as-cell animation that Hotel Transylvania did, but it is consistent and wonderful to look at.

Sadly, the effort put into this movie to distinguish it from the originals really shows, and this is a film more akin to the Smurfs as we know them. The drawback is that this movie doesn’t do anything else to make it especially memorable. By all means, see it as a fan of the Smurfs, and bring the kids. They’re the ones who are going to enjoy it the most. 

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