Could 3-D movie The Smurfs actually be protecting us from a fate worse than death?

By John and Matt Yuan

LOS ANGELES — A recent sneak peek into the making of The Smurfs broadened our horizons with regards to those little blue dudes (and one dudette). Yes, the Smurfs in the new live-action-plus-CGI movie are those Smurfs, the characters that became a worldwide sensation after their introduction in 1958, generating comic books, miniatures and eventually a cartoon series.

And yes, they have 300 different words for snow — all of which are pronounced “smurf.” But if you look beneath that Saturday morning cartoon veneer, you begin to see a much deeper — and more frightening — picture.

We know what some of you are thinking. Heck, we thought it ourselves. “Smurfs? Really?” We have to be honest. We rarely watched the Hanna-Barbera cartoons in the ’80s because Robotech aired at the same time. The only time we saw The Smurfs was when we switched channels to avoid some episode that involved too much Minmei.

Given our limited history with the little blue gits, we weren’t exactly champing at the bit to see the PG-rated Smurfs movie, which brings Belgian comics artist Peyo’s most famous creations to the silver screen for the first time. However, what we saw at Sony Imageworks Animation Studios changed all that.

Hank Azaria plays Gargamel, a sorcerer whose only real friend is his cat, Azrael.
(Images courtesy Sony Pictures Entertainment)

So what was it? What did we discover about the movie, which was directed by Raja Gosnell and stars Hank Azaria, Jayma Mays and geek favorite Neil Patrick Harris? Was it Azaria’s spot-on performance as evil sorcerer Gargamel? Watching him browbeat his cat in a dysfunctional-marriage kind of way was pretty awesome and, given cats’ propensity for pissing in your shoes when they’re in a mood, feline emotional abuse is something we can wholeheartedly support.

Maybe it was Mays and Harris’ injection of real heart into an otherwise fantastical tale. We don’t know about anyone else, but when small creatures invade our home, we have Twilight Zone flashbacks and the shotguns come out.

Mays and Harris’ characters don’t come out shooting. They take the Smurfs into their family — teaching us all that these two love bugs didn’t grow up in Texas, where uninvited guests get two barrels and a pine box.

Was it the humor? The Smurfs offers plenty for everyone, since the writers and director worked especially hard to make the gags work on multiple levels. Oh, and there’s something about hospitality and charity, too, but whatever….

Those are all good guesses and real close seconds, but what really clinched it, what really made us decide to see The Smurfs when it opens Friday, is the fact that this movie represents what makes America so totally freakin’ awesome.

No, no, it has nothing to do with the Smurfs and the underlying themes of cooperation, embracing differences and celebrating individuality.

As Weird Al put it, it’s all about the Pentiums.

Animators who worked on The Smurfs told us it took 5,000 eight-core Intel processors to render the film and that, on average, it took one animator a week to render three to four seconds of footage.

Considering that the Manhattan Project rode on the computing power of six dudes with slide rules and blunt pencils, we figure these machines can either animate a bunch of small blue people that live in mushrooms, or they can plot the destruction of humankind.

Anybody else in the world would be using these computers to design nuclear weapons, stealth fighters, UAVs or Lara Croft-crocodile hybrids, but not us. America uses its supercomputers to render monomaniacal blue Belgian gnomes.

Do you know what this means? It means that even with the omnipresent threat of terrorists, superbugs, bedbugs, re-emerging Third Reich superclones and Gorilla Grodd, we don’t have to be scared of anything.

Let’s say worst comes to worst. A year from now, all the evil, baby-eating freaks get together with their cat-juggling friends and zap our military installations with Tesla death rays. America, land of the free, home of the brave, far from being defenseless, turns to its ridiculously overpowered animation industry and uses the incredibly awesome computers to design Gundam-type mechs. Our new model army goes forth, beats the evil crap out of everybody else and Smurfs 2 still comes out on time.

But every light creates a shadow, so there is a dark side to all this.

If the machines can protect us, they can kill us. What do you think a computer with 29 quadrillion times the computing power of every man, woman and child on Earth is going to do when its movie doesn’t wind up at the top of the charts? You think it’s going to shrug, smile and tell itself, “Better luck next time?”

Or do you think it’s gonna go all Skynet on us and vaporize everyone dumb enough not to build a self-sustainable bunker six miles underground, leaving the rest of us eating rats, watching fire on TV and hiding from militarized clones of a philandering steroid freak while picking at our radioactive goiters?

We don’t know. We don’t claim to be experts in neural-net psychology. We do know, however, that when Uwe Boll — a plain, old non-artificial intelligence — received one too many bad reviews, he beat people up. Badly.

We’re doing our part to appease Skynet-in-waiting. If The Smurfs tanks at the box office and Aug. 1 turns out to be Judgment Day, it’s not going to be our fault.