Poor Peyo

[fpb]

At least he is dead. I have never in my life seen anything that shows so certain a prospect of utter catastrophe as the posters of the Smurfs movie. It is going to be a horror as surely as people breathe air. From the horrendously unsuited Pixar-like three-dimensional animation, that morphs Peyo's charming linework into soapy, rubbery dolls, to the

Comments

[eliskimo]

My introduction to the Smurfs as a kid was the Schleich figurines, so to me the Pixar animation looks right because it looks like those.

[fpb]

I can introduce you to at least half a billion kids who disagree with you. The Smurfs started as an excellent comic book, and it is as a comic book that they went around the world. Everything else is secondary. And The Smurfs In New York is an abomination.

[eliskimo]

Probably. I'm not saying anything about the comic books (which I never read, btw). All I'm saying is that *to me* (and probably my childhood peers) the look of the Pixar animation is close to the Smurfs I knew: the Schleich figurines. I learned about the toys first. I can even remember when Jackie Robb brought the first one I'd ever seen to school with her when we were in Grade Five. I remember how I absolutely HAD to have one (or more) and that I got one (Artist Smurf) in my stocking that Christmas. I believe it's still packed away in my box of childhood treasures. I remember the animated Saturday morning cartoon that came after that (this would have been the early 80s), but in my experience, the figurines were first.

The movie may well be an abomination. I'm not saying it isn't. I don't really know anything about it (haven't been paying attention).

[shezan]

3D Schtroumpfs???? Quelle horreur!!!

Fight Existential Creep! Halt Homoginization!

[rfachir]

(Sorry, the local political discourse is badly influencing my ability to think.)

Smurfs in New York are as much of an issue as New York in everywhere else (or Toronto as New York in everywhere else). It translates, but it doesn't feel real (or fantastical). Smurfette and Bridget Jones are fantasy heroines - we must preserve their fantasy habitats! Are Gargameld and Giuliani interchangeable? I think not. Smurf village is more Reykjavik than London or NYC, anyway. Can Sex in the City grow up to become I don't know how she does it without mutating both into Monsters?
We must leave a lighter footprint on fantasy worlds.