The Smurfs 2

Eight the­o­ries relat­ing to the myr­i­ad sub­texts of Raja Gosnell’s new work, The Smurfs 2:

1. Drugs

The obvi­ous (lazy) read­ing of both of the Smurfs films (for they are near­ly iden­ti­cal) is that they are sto­ries dri­ven by the con­sump­tion of and desire for ille­gal sub­stances and herbal highs. In the same way that British tea-time clas­sic The Mag­ic Round­about was lit­tle more than a vast net­work of thin­ly veiled acid trip ref­er­ences, The Smurfs too sees a bunch of blue-skinned munchkins liv­ing in colour­ful toad­stools and ingest­ing mag­ic Smurf rocks which take them through an inter-dimen­sion­al por­tal to a lux­u­ry apart­ment in down­town Man­hat­tan. Evil East­ern Euro­pean wiz­ard, Gargamel (Hank Azaria), also has a craven desire to extract essence of Smurf in order to give him the pow­er to take over the world. It even makes his wand get big­ger, so there are self esteem-enhanc­ing side effects too.

2. The joys of social networking

In Smurfs 2, Gargamel is intro­duced as an inter­na­tion­al celebri­ty and one of the world’s fore­most illu­sion­ists. He is even enjoy­ing a res­i­den­cy at Paris’ famous Opéra. How did he get to this point? How does any­one get any­where these days? By get­ting a mil­lion hits on YouTube, of course. The pop­u­lar­i­ty of online videos and their func­tion as an instan­ta­neous tick­et to suc­cess is killing the art of the cin­e­mat­ic mon­tage. Con­coct­ing the rea­sons why a character’s for­tunes have changed rad­i­cal­ly since we last saw them is an open goal for bound­less cre­ativ­i­ty. A pop­u­lar YouTube video is a cop out. Else­where, there are handy reminders through­out the film to make sure you update your Facebook/​Smurfbook sta­tus in order to keep your bray­ing fans amused.

3. Com­ing out

Con­ser­v­a­tive par­ents may want to shield their eyes (and the sen­si­tive eyes of their little’uns) from cer­tain moments in the appar­ent­ly lib­er­al-mind­ed Smurfs 2, as it presents Smurfette’s sud­den estrange­ment from her all-male com­pa­tri­ots as a qua­si-erot­ic odyssey in the City of Lights. Much of the plot is tak­en up by Vexy, a grey-skinned Smurf man­u­fac­tured by Gargamel (who, inci­den­tal­ly, dress­es up like a Port­landia bake shop pro­pri­etress replete with beanie hat and blue streak in her hair) try­ing to woo Smur­fette over to the dark side. She con­stant­ly yaps about how much fun it is to be ​“naughty”. When Smur­fette even­tu­al­ly suc­cumbs to Vexy’s coquet­tish come-ons, the pair even­tu­al­ly embrace. The gong-bong­ing hip­py-father, Papa Smurf, even­tu­al­ly bless­es their union.

4. Eugen­ics / Slavery

A stretch this, but a film about char­ac­ters in a des­per­ate search of chang­ing the colour of their skin is always a lit­tle sus­pect. The grey-skinned Vexy and her men­tal­ly defec­tive com­padre, Hackus (who, again, looks like he’s been chewed up and spat out by the Haight-Asbury set cir­ca 1975), are at the mer­cy of Gargamel and his tinc­ture of mag­i­cal essence. It’s Gargamel’s goal to locate the mag­ic for­mu­la there­by turn­ing his run­tish grey Smurfs into pow­er-giv­ing blue Smurfs. In short, Gargamel is Hitler.

5. The joy of sweets

There seems to be a clause with­in the Smurfs fran­chise hand­book which states that there has to be a scene in which the Smurfs get to run around/​smash up a sweet shop. It hap­pened in the first one, allow­ing many fine can­dy prod­ucts to get their names in front of the eyes of the film’s sug­ar-hun­gry audi­ences. The exact same thing hap­pens here. Bizarrely, one of the prod­ucts which gets a handy name check is Tic-Tacs. Yeah, cos that’s what the tod­dlers are all scoff­ing these days…

6. Learn­ing to love the work­ing classes

In a rather bizarre sub­plot, ter­mi­nal­ly flus­tered father and friend to the Smurfs, Patrick (Neil Patrick Har­ris), spends much of the film deny­ing his famil­ial her­itage by reject­ing his con­nec­tion to his step­fa­ther, The Corn Dog King (sic), played by Bren­dan Glee­son in a cream linen suit and kip­per tie. Patrick clear­ly has cer­tain prob­lems with his wipe-clean, con­tem­po­rary, organ­ic, gluten free, all-nat­ur­al New York lifestyle, but is utter­ly sick­ened by his boor­ish, Irish father and his junk food empire. The lessons of eter­nal love and friend­ship as preached by the Smurfs (plus the ordeal of Glee­son get­ting tem­porar­i­ly trans­formed into a duck) help them in the end to leap over that sick­en­ing corn dog bar­ri­cade and bridge the class chasm between them.

7. The plea­sures of rur­al life

Though both of the Smurfs films high­light the super­fi­cial plea­sures of life in the big city (they have sweet shops!), these are sto­ries about return­ing to a life of back­wards rur­al soli­tude as swift­ly and clean­ly as pos­si­ble. In many ways, the Smurfs have some­thing of an iso­la­tion­ist streak to them, as they only ever seem to min­gle with their own kind with­in the con­fines of their tiny toad­stool vil­lage. There’s some­thing of a Wiz­ard of Oz les­son here: we may have basked in the bright lights of a fairy­tale land, but we must nev­er for­get the hor­ren­dous, dis­eased dust farm where we came from.

8. Noth­ing

Or it could be a bunch of stuff hap­pen­ing for kids. Peo­ple fall over, songs are sung and love even­tu­al­ly finds a way. Yeah, that’s prob­a­bly it.