La Flûte à six schtroumpfs

I used to be obsessed with comic books as a child. When we weren't playing soccer, me and my friends would ride our bikes to the city library where we'd spend the day reading their gigantic collection, and then take an average of 12 back home with us twice a week. Asterix, Les Tuniques Bleues, Chick Bill, Iznogoud, Thorgal, Achille Talon...all amazing series which I have to thank for my excellent proficiency in the french language. The library also had several movies the public was free to watch, including this one, one of my absolute favorites. I had forgotten all about it until I recently caught it on television while channel jumping...the wave of memories it stirred up at the moment made me cry, I'm not embarassed to say it.

This one-hour cartoon movie unites both the Les Schtroumpfs (the Smurfs) series and the Johan Et Pirlouit series, both by belgian comic book immortal Peyo. Pirlouit, the lovable midget prankster, gets his hand on a magical flute made by les schtroumpfs that forces whoever listens to its melody to dance uncontrollably. You can imagine what he does with it :) However he makes the mistake of demonstrating its power in front of Torchesac, a wandering traveller spending the night in the castle, who subsequently steals it and uses it to rob people by making them dance until they pass out of fatigue. Now Johan and Pirlouit must get it back at all costs, so they head to the magical kingdom of les schtroumpfs to ask for their help.

This movie is extremely old so the animation isn't up to par with what you see today, however it has something today's cartoons don't have: great humor and excellent dialogue. C'est inoui, halfway through the movie I couldn't help but feel pity for today's kids who grow up on cartoons where the dialogue is dumbed down as much as possible, or made cookie-cutter in the sense that there MUST be a moral lesson in the end. It's like they were americanized. This movie isn't like that, the dialogue contains vocabulary and sentence syntax of high level, it feels exactly like reading french comics.

The music is great as well, highlights are the "flute fight" between Pirlouit and Torchesac and the song "Un Petit Schtroumpf", which is probably one of the best musicals moments in film.

Hello from Barcelona. Yes, this is a great movie. The smurfs don't appear until minute 35 or so but never mind. Johan and Pewee characters are lovely and we know they will meet smurfs later so never mind. The film is 74 minutes long, not 89. Michel Legrand songs are really beautiful and brilliant. All children will love this film and many not so children... Smurfs are drawn much better than the terrific Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows. Here they are just smurfs as they must be, not some kind of bad project bad drown and with no gracefulness. We see Peyo WAS in this movie. If you know the book of this film then you must watch this it. I wonder why it doesn't exist on DVD. There are some smurfs official DVD's in France but this movie is not available yet and I don't understand why if this is the only smurf film ever. I think you can find it in USA, UK, France, Germany, Belgium and Netherlands, but always in VHS format. In some countries it is long deleted since lots of years ago but easy to find in eBAY for example. It's nearly impossible to find in Spain 'cause it was only for rent. In Catalonia there are the catalan version which is just adorable. So...we want this movie on DVD today!! And you must watch it right now!! Joan from Barcelona

My review was written in February 1984 after a Times Square screening.

"The Smurfs and the Magic Flute" is an uninteresting but innocuous animated feature film bringing the popular hit of books, tv and merchandising, the Smurfs (or "Schtroumpfs" as they were originally known in parts of Europe) to the big screen. Its success in U. S. distribution just before the last Christmas season is more a testament to effective marketing and a vacuum of new, G-rated product than to the virtues of the film itself.

Weak, episodic storyline, set in the Middle Ages, has a bandit named Oilycreep stealing the magic flute (which has the power to cause people to dance uncontrollably when it is played) from Pee Wee at the king's castle. Pee Wee, whose dubbed voice vaguely resembles that of comic Pee Wee Herman, sets out on a dull trek with his pal Johan to retrieve the magical instrument.

Hypnotized by a friendly wizard, the twosome are transported to the land of the Smurfs, tiny blue creatures who all look alike and wear white hats and pants, except for their 542-year-old leader Papa Smurf, whose hat and pants are red. The Smurfs fabricate a second magic flute for Pee Wee, who ultimately bests Oilycreep in a final reel musical battle. Film has no relationship to Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute".

Despite their billing and title come-on, the Smurfs do not appear (save for a tiny blue hand entering the frame at one point) until the second half of the film. A defensive song designed to demonstrate hw individual Smurfs act like their names only proves that the character animation here lacks the differentiation of say, Disney's Seven Dwarfs.

The film utilizes rather limited animation techniques, with pretty but strictly static backgrounds against which the characters move. Absence of much fantasy material is disappointing and the labored gags aren't funny. The Smurfs themselves have irritating resonant voices and the premise of substituting the word "Smurf" for nouns and verbs in their language is run into the ground. Michel Legrand's soundtrack score (to which additional music has been added for the U. S. release version) is subpar.

Many adults forget that children used to the animated series "the Smurfs" may be disoriented by "The Smurfs and the Magic Flute". I don't forget how confused I was when my parents brought this home from the video store. First off, none of the usual human characters in the animated series appear in the movie. (Missing is Gargamel, among others). The biggest difference is that the voices of the smurfs are completely different than they are in the show, and only a fraction of the personalities in the show are represented. The voices have an eery and, frankly, annoying sound effect on them, making them sound even more chirpy and otherworldy than they ever did on TV.

These inexplicable inconsistencies are coupled with some basic faults: The smurfs do not appear until 20 minutes into the film, long after your kids have left the room or turned on the X box. The story is hard to follow and uninteresting. The magic Flute amounts to nothing more than an oddity for "hardcore" smurf fans.

This is a real classic: fantastic story by Peyo, classy animation (far superior than Hanna & Barbera's) and great characters. For all the people complaining about the Smurfs not being the main characters, you just don't get it right. This was not meant as a Smurf's story, this was a Johan and Pirlouit story. In this story the Smurfs made their first appearance ever, and they were really meant as secondary characters. Only, they became so popular, that Peyo had to start the Smurf's comic book series, as well. So, blame it on the American distributors that marketed this as a Smurf film, while it's actually a fantastic Johan and Pirlouit story.