So I can attest that those cheerfully one-note little dudes were a genius merchandising play—which is probably the main reason there are 100 of the tiny bastards, after all. But even then I knew that Smurfette, as the rare adjectiveless Smurf not named after an attribute like Clumsy or Brainy, was also the only really interesting Smurf. Not just because she has a permanent identity crisis and a lack of gal-pals in her life, but because she’s the one Smurf who doesn’t fit in. She lives in a mushroom shanty-town of total conformity and absolute patriarchy (the leader is even named Papa!) and she’s the only person who’s not just a brick in the blue wall.
And when the Smurfs finally went Hollywood in 2011, one question remained unanswered: How do you solve a problem like Smurfette? Not only is she the only well-known girl Smurf (very few people remember Nanny and Sassette), she’s also a textbook example of the lone female in a group of boy heroes, having been created by the evil wizard Gargamel to destroy the Smurfs with her feminine wiles. (Papa eventually used Smurf magic to make her not-evil, and also blonde.) Her status as the uncommon “-ette” may have been easy to overlook in the 1960s, when she first showed up in the Smurfs comics to torment her male counterparts, but five decades and a women’s movement later it’s a glaring imbalance, one every 21st-century Smurf movie has awkwardly struggled to address. In the two critically panned live-action films, Smurfette was a hero—rescuing Papa Smurf in one, redeeming two new evil Smurfs in the other—but she never escaped the most fiendish trap of all: tokenism.
Now, at last, there’s a Smurfs film that tackles the Smurfette dilemma head on—and actually solves it.
Smurfs: The Lost Village, out today, is entirely computer-animated, and feels a bit more like the Smurfs comics and cartoons from back in the day. If you go by its synopsis, the movie is about a previously unknown village of Smurfs hidden in a forbidden forest—but really, it’s about Smurfette, and who exactly she is.
The movie begins by pointing out the obvious: She’s not intrinsically “clumsy” or “hefty” or good at baking, the way her single-attribute brothers are. So what’s the one adjective or activity that sums up the blonde-haired lady Smurf? Various Smurfs offer ideas, but nothing works out.
Over the course of the film that follows, the question of what easy label to stick onto Smurfette slowly turns into a larger problem: Is she even a real Smurf? She was created by Gargamel, the wizard who wants to capture the Smurfs and drain their magic juices, after all. So the issue of whether she’s allowed to have a personality other than “female” is slowly overtaken by the question of whether she deserves acceptance or trust—a subtle nod to the reactions of people who are skeptical that women are even “real” fans any time they seek greater representation in major franchises.
And of course, there’s a twist about the Lost Village, which I won’t give away but totally upends the ideas most viewers have had about Smurf gender and politics over the years. When you turn the question of Smurfette’s legitimacy sideways, the way this movie does, it’s the rest of the Smurfs who end up looking a little weird. More than a little, actually. After all, at least Smurfette can be whoever she wants to be in the moment—unlike Nosey Smurf, whose entire wheelhouse is invading other Smurfs’ privacy. Moreover, Lost Village finally addresses the fact that pigeonholing the male characters as “the smart one” or “the strong one” diminishes them just as much as Smurfette’s single-blue-female status reduces her.
Smurfs: The Lost Village is not a Pixar-level animated movie; at best, it’s a middle-of-the-road kids’ cartoon. But considering most kids’ movies, especially ones about the Smurfs, don’t have messages of female empowerment at all, this one’s Smurfette twist is clever and deft—and completely out of the blue.
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