If you watch the two films that have the box office this year, “A Minecraft Movie” and “Lilo & Stitch”, it is clear that we are at a time when a plot parents take a plot Children who are not Very old in the cinema. Suddenly, we are in a universe where PG is king. The eras where the prices for super healthy children are the rules of the perch, there was a famous in 1990, when the first film of “teenage mutant Ninja Turtles” made a Hollywood drop by opening at 25 million dollars, a crazy quantity at the time “Ghost” (the film was found like the # 4 Office Improve of the year, just behind “Ghost” Woman “and” Home Office “). Given the general straits that cinema is faced today, it should be happy to find success everywhere, and if it means that the energetic fodder for children is what is hot, too bad.
Given that 2025 promises to be this way, it is poetically just that we now get the first film SMURFS in eight years. His name is, quite simply, “Smurfs”, which has a certain confidence in brand matters, a bit like when the Beatles entitled what would be known as the white album like, simply, “The Beatles”. It is perhaps just that the “Smurfs” are the first film of Smurfs that I saw – and I saw them all, because I do this, dear readers, so that you do not have to do it – which is explicitly shaped on “Trolls”, the fairy tale of 2016 which, I think, is one of the five animated films most inspired by its decade.
“Schurfs” is not half as good. The reason? It’s a film Smurfs. There are serious limits to what I will discuss shortly. For a while, however, let’s point to note that the “Smurfs”, like “Trolls” (and its lower 2020 suite, “Trolls World Tour”), is a pop musical, which means that it has EDM sequences with ancient dance movements and, at one point, an unhappy anthem, that is to say “always outside” which resembles an elo-sparrow. Whether he is titled by a large music star, Rihanna (who is one of the producers), singing and expressing the role of the smurfette, the only female Smurf (and the only one with the hair of Nancy Sinatra). That it Costars James Corden like the voice of No Name Smurf, a sad bag overflowing with anxiety, because there is no thing Let him do it (that’s why he has no name), and that makes him a version of the neurotically intended branch of Justin Timberlake in “Trolls”. And that the film, which begins in Smurf Village, a hidden enclave whose place is quickly discovered by the villain (a direct twist of “trolls”), then jumps from one place to another, even moving through portals, which makes it the first film of Smurfs which takes place effectively within a multiverse.
At this point, you may wonder: do we still have fun-or, more precisely, as much pleasure as our 8 or 9 year old child? The answer to this last question is an uncompromising. The Smurfs, as all of Smurfiana know, are based on a series of Belgian comics by the designer named Peyo who was launched in 1958, which makes them venerable and original. But when you watch a Smurfs film, there is a reason why the characters present themselves as a bland derivative.
Is it because each of them resembles the fusion of a hobbit, the elf Keebler, Poppin ‘Fresh and one of the seven dwarfs of Disney (notably Dopey), and that they are named as the seven dwarfs? (In the case of “Sminons”, the characters include Brainy Smurf, Grouchy Smurf, Clumsy Smurf, Smurf Hefty, Smurf, Smurf Quiet, Moxie Smurf and Sound Effects Smurf always seem … The same! Like three dozen versions of the same character. Their everything is to learn to work together, but they are already so uniforms. In the “Smurfs”, this message presents itself as a cuddly version of the Communist Manifesto.
The Smurfs are in possession of a magic book which is part of a set of four, just like the Infinity Stones in the films “Avengers”. If the villain, a evil sorcerer named Gargamel, can steal it and bring together the whole, he will govern the universe. Gargamel is expressed by JP Karliak as a scout -magician scourtel -magician who feels like an imitation of a bad girl, I think, has a lot more personality – Cedric the sorcerer of the great Disney “Sofia the First”. Gargamel has a brother, Razamel (also expressed by Karliak), which is even more effective. At the other end of the vocal spectrum, there is a trio of former leaders of Smurf Bruff: the Smurf Papa with white beard (John Goodman), which is kidnapped by Gargamel, as well as his brother, the Ken-White-White-Byferman), and their long-lost Sibling, the Briom-He’s-Platinum ( Russell).
Far from their village, the Smurfs land in places with photographic decorations, such as the Australian Outback and a section of the motorway outside Munich, with a winding castle plunged in the middle. There is an episode that takes place in the country of SnooterPoots, a tribe of feathered fur balls led by Mama Pot, expressed by Natasha Lyonne in frazzed fury. There is also a section of the film where the Smurfs are visualized, in rapid succession, in a world of clay, as drawings of sketch book, as anime warriors and as characters from a video game from the 80s. It was really cool! And there is the occasional funny line like: “I think I come from smurfed my pants!” “Smurfs” could be the best of Smurfs films. It is a kind diversion for children. But with its blue McDwarfs in crusade to be “good guards”, it is always difficult to escape the feeling that “Smurfs” are a film that puts harmless innocence.
