CGI Smurfs movie!

[ShyViolet]

Neat Hank Azaria interview!


http://www.aintitcool.com/node/52170

[Randall]

Any thoughts on the recent sequel?

http://animatedviews.com/2013/the-smurfs-2/

[Dacey]

I enjoyed it. I thought Vexy was adorable and would love to see her in the third one. Also, call me whatever you want to, but when smurfs sing with the voice of Britney Spears, I smile.

[EricJ]

Any thoughts on the recent sequel?

Yeah, just noticed: WHY do they always take a sequel to London or Paris?

[LotsoA113]

Well how else are they gonna boost their profile internationally, thereby making more money?

Plus, it makes the whole thing easier, since that setting is pretty much the plot in and of itself (we wouldn't want them straining to actually create new adventures like in Kung Fu Panda 2, Monsters University and Toy Story 3, now would we?)

[Dacey]

First trailer for The Lost Village...

http://animatedviews.com/2016/watch-the ... t-village/

Is it just me, or do the Smurfs look exactly the same here as they did in the live-action movies? Not that there's anything wrong with that, I guess, but this is seeming like "The Smurfs 3" instead of an actual reboot.

(And I'm not knocking on the live-action Smurfs films. "Popular" opinion aside, I thought they were sweet and in spirit with the cartoon while gently poking fun at it)

[Ben]

I don't think they look like they do in the previous films (it's CG, how different can you go) but at least they have more cartoony eyes and squashy animation than before.

As for the teaser...meh...looks like Avatar.

[droosan]

Yeah, the eyes are the biggest difference from the live-action Smurfs movies, and are a closer match to Peyo's drawing style. Compare Brainy's glasses, too.

[Dacey]

Yup! There is more of a difference than I thought. Guess a side-by-side comparison helps.

[EricJ]

Sony Animation's determined to "make" the Smurfs the official SPA House Icon come smurf or high water. (Which explains why we got a Smurfs joke out of nowhere in "Pixels" even though they had a console game, not an arcade one, and those garden gnomes and runaway Ferris wheel in "Goosebumps" look awfully darn familiar to any Smurfs 2 survivor.)
They released the full-animated Christmas OVA as a tie-in to the first live movie, so the idea of just doing further full-animated Smurfs without Doogie Howser or Hank Azaria--and mercifully, without Raja Gosnell--was always there. The animation's got a good look so far, and seems like the Peyo/HB-canon project they "should" have been doing all along if smarmy Hybrid comedies hadn't been coin of the realm.

As one who never actually grew up on the 80's toon (it was just everywhere, us discerning fans avoided it like the PawPaws and Ewoks knockoffs), the opening of the first movie inside the actual series universe of the village looked...sort of cute, really, before they started bringing on the obnoxious and overbearingly self-mocking pop-culture in-jokes by the Scooby-director guy.
I've had the urge to go back and look up the Warner Archive DVD's of the old-school 80's toon--yes, with the theme song that it was cool to joke back then about how much it annoyed us--but not sure if I'm prepared to go that far yet.

[Dacey]

Warner's handling of Smurfs on DVD has been nothing short of terrible.

They put the first season and a half out on disc before giving up on that and releasing cheapo five episode "volumes" that were already repeating ones from previous releases. And with the show now available on Amazon Prime, it seems unlikely it will ever get a proper DVD release, at least in the states.

[gaastra]

Full trailer.

[rjones1325]

Sony, the repulsive whores of reboots, are back at it again. Before they give us our third reincarnation of Spider-Man this July, they decide give us a fully CG Smurfs reboot nobody asked for. Yep, we're getting two Sony franchise reboots within the same year people! But who cares? It’s the Smurfs as you should’ve seen them in the first place.

https://rendyreviews.com/movies//smurfs ... st-village

[Dacey]

This looks really cute so far, but the RT score is a rather shockingly low 25% "fresh" right now. Maybe Smurfs were never meant to please critics.

For what it's worth, I found the last two Smurfs outings to be perfectly charming affairs (and I think Rand did, too).

[EricJ]

As you can see from the earlier post, I so WANTED this movie to be good after Sony had the good audience-awareness sense to take their Smurfs 2 lumps and go back to their 80's-cartoon "roots" to keep Sony Animation's hope for a house icon. (And yes, I still want to grant the old show "amnesty" after thirty years, and look up the Warner boxset disks, as soon as I finish with the DuckTales ones.)
Between this and admitting defeat on Spiderman, it looked like their therapy was starting to take hold.

But they officially lost me when Gargamel in the trailer told his cat "I'll be like...And you'll be like..."
My respect for the late Paul Winchell aside, let us please retire that gag from all future CGI comedies. It wasn't even funny when Shrek tried to make it sound "contemporary".