Smurfs: The Lost Village (2017)

The Smurfs return in fully animated form, a reboot of the live-action hybrids, and the result is a gentle, blue-hued adventure in which a map causes Smurfette and three male companions to discover a hidden village. The voice cast is unusually diverse for a property about identical blue creatures: Demi Lovato, Michelle Rodriguez, Danny Pudi, Tituss Burgess, and Gabriel Iglesias populate the grove. The characters remain uniformly blue, so the diversity lives in the recording booth, not on the screen. That is a real but limited gesture. It earns some credit and no more.

The film's central concern is Smurfette, the lone female Smurf, who finds an entire village of female Smurfs and, with it, a purpose beyond being just a girl. Two women wrote the screenplay, and the project received a ReFrame Stamp for gender parity. The story is built around her self-worth, her belonging, and her eventual declaration that she can be anything she wants to be. This is delivered with a light touch, more bedtime story than public service announcement. The closing moral is present, but it does not scold. It simply arrives, smiles, and waits for the credits.

Elsewhere, the film is content to be a children's fantasy. There are no LGBTQ themes, no engagement with race, no climate parable, no critique of wealth, no body positivity, no neurodivergent framing, and no revision of history. Gargamel seeks magical power, not market dominance. The Smurfs are one blue species, so racial consciousness never enters. Brainy and Clumsy are comic types, not diagnostic categories. The result is a modest animated feature with a feminist spine and a diverse voice cast, surrounded by long stretches of harmless Smurf business. It means well, and it says so, but it rarely raises its voice.