Peyo

I’m not convinced that the live-action/animation hybrid The Smurfs movie is destined to be terrible. It’ll probably be terrible, but it doesn’t have to be. The original Peyo comic books are very good, smart, often political. If you’ve read the one where the Smurf village devolves into civil war over questions of whether to use “Schtroumpf” (or, in English, “Smurf,” because that’s totally a real English word) at the beginning of a phrase or at the end of it — a sly reference to Belgian politics — you can see why Sony thinks there’s a Shrek-like franchise somewhere in there, because Peyo essentially created an escapist fairy tale with a streak of hip contemporary relevance. That describes what all non-Pixar animated movies aspire to be.