Apparently computer animation has made it much to easy for Hollywood to make animated movies, because they’re running out of ideas and resorting to adapting 80s cartoons into feature films. The new, computer animated, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles isn’t far off, and now it looks like there’s movement on the long rumored Smurfs movie too.
Moviehole has smurfed up a great scoop on the project, in an interview with Producer Jordan Kerner. Kerner confirms what we already knew, “It’s a 3-D/CG Smurfs. You just can’t make those guys live – it’d be a little weird, but a 3D Shrek world of them - that’s fantastic.” Oh I don’t know about that Jordan. Rubber suits worked pretty well for the Ninja Turtles. Ok, maybe not.
It seems the reason we haven’t heard anything about the film since the first rumors started circulating back in 2005 is that Kerner has been locked away in a dungeon somewhere watching all 234 episodes of the show, “numerous times”. That’s a lot of Gargamel! Their goal is to make little blue guys who live in mushrooms believable. “Herb Ratner and I have been working really hard at looking where all the holes were in the episodes,” he says. “What we’ve done is we’ve plugged all those holes in a trilogy of three movies, and we reveal things as we go along.”
That’s right folks, they’re planning a Smurfs trilogy. That’s three movies for those of you without calculators. Three movies about anatomically ambiguous little blue guys who refuse to wear shirts. Why three movies? Because the hobbits did it. Kerner says the movies will be “the animated Lord of the Rings – through the world of these idiots.” He doesn’t mean that in a negative way. “Because they’re sweet characters but they’re goofs. It’s a comic version, but still very heartfelt, version of Lord of the Rings – though not literally Lord of the Rings, but an epic story like that.”
Was it like this after Star Wars? I’m too young to remember. It seems like every director with a fantasy project to sell insists he should get three movies and as if to justify it, starts waving Lord of the Rings around to sell us on it. The Smurfs are not Lord of the Rings and while, ok, I might be kind of interested to see one movie just for nostalgia’s sake, three is absolutely insane. This is not an epic. It’s a fun little cartoon.
If The Hobbit ever gets made, I suppose Kerner will want to plan a Smurfs prequel too. For this movie though, he’s thinking backstory, and tells Clint over at Moviehole that they want to more fully examine the origins of Gargamel and his favorite dish, Smurf Soup. Kerner wants to know, “what really goes on in that castle.” Personally, I’m more interested in what’s going on inside those mushroom houses. An entire village of little blue shirtless men and only one woman? A Smurf named Handy? Come on, we know what’s going on. Maybe Gargamel’s a homophobe.
