Smurfs, a new Paramount Pictures CGI-spectacle directed by Chris Miller, has received an all-round critical panning and faltered at the box office. But it does a serviceable job reminding viewers of the utter strangeness of the three-apples-tall characters originally conceived of by Belgian comic artist Pierre “Peyo” Culliford in 1958.
In the film, James Corden voices No Name Smurf, who experiences existential angst because unlike the other inhabitants of Smurf Village – Brainy, Grouchy, Hefty etc – he does not “have his own thing”, a skill or character trait that makes him stand out. This special trait is eventually identified as “magic” and No Name is pressed – by a serenading Rihanna-voiced Smurfette – to realise his inner USP and “don’t let anyone ever say you are not anyone” and accept that “you were born great”.
An identity crisis might be a relatively novel experience for the motormouthed British actor, but it is certainly a first in the 67-year history of Peyo’s blue cosmos. In fact, it may be a contradiction in terms: to be a good Smurf, in the proto-communist vision of the original comics, was to never elevate your own personality above the collective.
Of Smurf Village’s original 100 inhabitants, says French sociologist and Smurfologist Antoine Buéno, “About 90% were totally indistinguishable. They all looked the same, they were all dressed the same.” While some Smurfs were identified by name, he says, this was usually through a skill that is related to how he (all of the original Smurfs were male) is useful to the community. “The Smurfian society is an archetypal corporatist society, meaning that each Smurf that is identified represents a social function.”
In Miller’s latest reboot of the franchise, unleashing your true inner self is presented as the key to overcoming a problem – in Peyo’s original book, it is the root of all evil. “In the comics, each time a Smurf tries to be an individual, it creates a catastrophe,” Buéno says.
For instance, in the second book of the original series, 1965’s Le Schtroumpfissime (King Smurf), the inhabitants of the village hold a vote for an interim leader in the absence of Papa Smurf, but democracy does not become them. One nameless Smurf realises he can play the system by making promises he can’t keep to each of his potential voters, and wins. But once elected, he rules as an autocrat, installing an oppressive regime marshalled by Hefty Smurf and forcing the other Smurfs to build him a palace. The book was translated into Dutch as De Smurführer.
“All bad comes from individuality, which is also linked with private property”, says Buéno. “Each time private property is claimed in the village, it ruins the whole balance of the society.”
The 2011 book in which Buéno explored the hidden ideological underpinnings of Peyo’s fictional world, Le Petit Livre Bleu: Analyse Critique et Politique de la Société des Schtroumpfs, triggered a bitter backlash from true blue fans, and is wilfully polemical in the way it spells out political allusions that the comics never make explicit. The revolutionary connotations of the Phrygian caps (red for Papa, white for all the rest) are plausible, the identification of bearded Papa Smurf as Marx and bespectacled Brainy as Trotsky perhaps less so.
The search for messages hidden in the books may even have distracted from how genuinely original an exercise in storytelling the Smurfs were on the surface: a series of tales with 100 protagonists, of whom most look exactly the same, in which heroism lies in collective action.
Speaking more than a decade after the publication of his Little Blue Book, Buéno sounds more balanced in his assessment. “My theory was always that Peyo was not into politics at all”, he says. “But his genius was in creating a utopia that drew from our joint political history and coming up with images that spoke to everyone.”
Using Smurf Village as an example of working socialism did not just die with the new reboot, it was washed out of the Smurfverse after Peyo sold the rights to his creation in the 1970s. “For me, what we witnessed in the Smurfs is a perfect demonstration of Guy Debord’s analysis of capitalism”, says Buéno. “Capitalism’s strength lies in never frontally destroying its enemies, but taking them in and digesting them.”