Smurfs get real for big screen adventure

The Smurfs are about to turn the silver screen blue.

Next weekend, Jordan Kerner – the dean of the School of Filmmaking at UNC School of the Arts – will finally see his long-planned adaptation of the little blue characters hit theaters in "The Smurfs" feature film.

"I love taking something people perceive as a cartoon and making it real," Kerner said last week in Los Angeles, while talking with reporters about the film.

Since the late 1990s, he had been in discussions with the family of Peyo, the Belgian cartoonist who created the Smurfs back in 1958, and promised to make the film faithful to the original characters. "The Smurfs" was originally conceived as a purely animated film, but gradually evolved into a hybrid, with computer-generated Smurfs interacting with human actors against real-life settings. Students from the UNC School of the Arts were interns on the film and some participated in a program in which they shadowed members of the production team.

The film tells the story of a small band of Smurfs who travel through a magical portal that takes them from their forest home into modern-day New York City. Pursued by evil wizard Gargamel and his cat Azrael, they have to find a way home, bonding with a New York couple along the way.

Some of the actors from the film were also on hand in Los Angeles to discuss their roles. Here's what they had to say:

Alan Cumming

Cumming is a Scottish actor known for his roles on such movies as "X2: X-Men United," "Goldeneye," "Titus," and the TV show "The Good Wife." He provides the voice of Gutsy, one of the few Smurfs created specifically for the new movie. The character was added to provide the Smurf troop with an action hero, according to the producers.

"It's kind of ironic that I've been brought in to 'butch up' the Smurfs," said Cumming, who in real life is openly gay.

Gutsy is a distinctly Scottish Smurf, clad in a kilt and sporting a thick brogue. "I rarely play someone Scottish," Cumming said. "At least I didn't have to be nervous about vowel sounds as I often am in my life."

He also got to contribute to the character, including suggesting an insult the character could fling around, "numpty," a Scottish word for an idiot. "Numpty is a very good word, a very onomatopoeic insult," Cumming said. "Not a lot of people say it anymore; it's kind of an old-fashioned Scottish word, so I thought it would be perfect.

"And then when I realized how much it was in the film and everything I thought 'I'm re-introducing this word into the lexicon.' I'm sort of an ambassador for the Scottish language."

Hank Azaria

Azaria is best known as the voice of characters including Moe the bartender, Apu and Comic Book Guy on "The Simpsons." He also has a career in front of the camera, and will be one of the stars of this fall's NBC sitcom "Free Agents." In "The Smurfs," he plays a live action role, though one that is decidedly cartoonish: bumbling wizard Gargamel, a bad guy who wants to catch the Smurfs so he can drain their magic to use in his spells.

To play the role, he shaved his head (not because he is a method actor, he said, just for convenience) and wore prosthetics, including bushy fake eyebrows, to emulate the look of Gargamel from the original cartoons.

"As a vocally oriented character actor, it's fun to actually turn into somebody literally," he said. "It was challenging in that it almost became a mask." The bushy fake eyebrows, for instance, covered his real eyebrows and hid his expressions. "You really need to be overly expressive. A lot of what I thought would be too far was not far enough with this character."

He was familiar with the characters before the movie was offered to him.

"Smurfs got very popular in America in the '80s, and I was a bit old, I was a teenager. But being a very immature one, I watched them anyway.

"I loved the Smurfs, but I never loved Gargamel. I loved Paul Winchell very much, who did the voice, but it was the one character he ever did that was not particularly funny or that was kind of one note. So I always wanted to retool him and make him funnier.

"To me, the idea that he's basically married to a cat was funny and should be played up."

There is plenty of slapstick in the film between Gargamel and Azrael, who is a mix of real cats and CGI used to exaggerate his features and keep the genuine kitties safe during scenes of cartoonish violence.

"There were two cats, one high-energy and one low-energy," Azaria recalled. "Cats, as you may know from life, don't care . They are impossible to train, almost."

Jayma Mays

Mays is best known as neurotic guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury on the hit Fox series "Glee." In the movie, she plays Grace, a pregnant New Yorker who bonds with the Smurfs, particularly Smurfette and Clumsy (a bumbler who causes the mishap that leads to the Smurfs being stranded), while she and her husband try to help them find their way back home.

Growing up, Mays says, she watched the Saturday morning Smurfs cartoon every week, but not by choice. "My mom was a big, big Smurfs fan, so she would force me to watch every Saturday morning, I had no choice in the matter," she said. "To spite her, I would say I loved Gargamel and Azrael."

But, she says, "I did secretly love to watch the show."

She liked that the show had a message about embracing your individuality and working together, and said that the movie captures that spirit.

"I love the fact that what the movie was trying to say was that it's OK to be unique," she said. "It's cool to be different, and whatever your trait is, that's cool and OK."

Neil Patrick Harris

Harris has played such iconic characters as Barney Stinson on "How I Met Your Mother" and Doogie Howser. In "The Smurfs," he plays Patrick, Grace's husband, an ambitious young executive who worries that he isn't ready for fatherhood.

Harris was familiar with the Smurfs, but didn't realize the characters had been around since the 1950s.

"I thought the whole thing was created by Hanna Barbera in the '80s," he said. "I thought they were just part of the Captain Caveman/Wonder Twin Powers movement."

One of his favorite aspects of the film, he said, was the fact that he and his partner were expecting twins when the film was in the works. As a result, scenes involving Patrick thinking about being a dad had a special poignancy for him.

"When I was filming the movie, we were five, maybe six, months pregnant and weren't telling anybody," he recalled. "It was my little secret. And it was easy to play things like looking at an ultrasound photo and feeling what emotion that brings.

"Both Raja (Gosnell, the director) and Jordan had been constantly telling me what it feels like to be a potential dad, and how your heart will skip beats when find out you're expecting, and I would nod and say, 'Is that right?' "

A few things you (probably) didn't know about the Smurfs

They weren't originally called Smurfs. Originally, the characters were named Les Schtroumpfs. Cartoonist Pierre Culliford, who went by the pen name "Peyo," came up with the name by accident when he tried to ask a colleague to pass him the salt at the dinner table and forgot the French word for salt. Peyo used the name for a race of tiny woodland elves in his comic strip "Johan et Pirlouit," about a heroic young man and his sidekick in the Middle Ages. The characters, introduced in 1958, became popular enough to get their own spinoff stories and got the name Smurfs when they were translated into Dutch and English.

Gargamel is a lifesaver. Paul Winchell, the voice actor who provided the voice of dastardly Gargamel in the Smurfs cartoons, was one of the inventors of the first artificial heart, alongside Henry Heimlich, the man responsible for the Heimlich Maneuver. Winchell studied pre-med at Columbia University and held patents for dozens of inventions, including a disposable razor, a blood plasma defroster and battery-heated gloves. He was also the voice of Tigger in "Winnie the Pooh," Dick Dastardly in "The Perils of Penelope Pitstop," and was a famous ventriloquist.

Papa Smurf isn't the oldest Smurf in the land. In the French comics, Le Vieux Vieux Schtroumpf ("The Old Old Smurf") was Papa Smurf's papa. When he guest-starred in the American Smurfs cartoon, he was voiced by Jonathan Winters – who provides the voice of Papa Smurf in the new movie.

Smurfette was a latecomer to the Smurfs village. The character ("Schtroumpfette" in the original text) was introduced in 1966, and she was originally a magical creation by Gargamel meant to infiltrate the Smurfs (this origin is briefly mentioned in the new movie). But she became enamored of the Smurfs' happy lives and was transformed by a spell from Papa Smurf, changing from brunette to blonde in the process.

Smurfs are three crabapples tall and are all male except for Smurfette and a few other characters introduced in later years. And if you're wondering about a village with 99 boy Smurfs and only one Smurfette, baby Smurfs are delivered by stork.

Not all Smurfs are blue. In the original Belgian comics, there was a race of black Smurfs called Les Schtroumpfs Noirs. When they were introduced in American cartoons they were made purple instead to avoid racial insensitivity.

"The World of Smurfs: A Celebration of Tiny Blue Proportions" by Matt. Murray.