Last weekend, Mr Z and I had the chance to go to a screening of the new Smurfs 2 movie to celebrate the launch of the new Jakks Pacific Smurfs toy range.
Neither of us had actually seen Smurfs 1 before. I will admit all I really knew about Smurfs is that they are cute, and they are blue! But after watching the movie I learned a lot more.
I had thought that Smurfs was a 100% cartoon movie, but it is not. It is a bit more grown up and more of an in depth story than a lot of the cartoon movies we have seen. I found it easy enough to follow what was going on despite not having seen the previous movie, so that should not be a barrier to seeing or enjoying the movie.
The story centres around the evil magician Gargamel and his plan to turn his “naughties” into real smurfs so that he can harvest the blue smurf essence and take over the world! The naughties are new characters, called Hackus and Vexy and there are figurines of these in the new range. The film also includes human actors, the smurfs human friends who come together to help rescue Smurfette who has been captured by Gargamel.
Mr Z is 5 years old and he was a bit scared during the film, mainly because of the Gargamel character. He did enjoy it, but he always finds it a little scary during new films if they have any baddies in it! And as I said, this film was a little bit more scary and ‘older’ than I had expected. I would say 5+ is about the right age range for it, for children who don’t get scared quite so easily. Mr Z is the oldest of my children so he still watches a lot of the slightly younger stuff with his brothers, but a 5 year old who is the youngest and wanting to catch up with older siblings would probably find it really cool. Among the other bloggers was my friend Eileen from ET Speaks from Home and her 5 and 4 year old children did not find it too scary, so all children are different. (you can see Eileen’s post here) I did enjoy the film myself.
After the film, there were lots of Smurfy activities for the children to join in with, led by these Smurfy people who were there to engage the children in all the fun and help to get a smurftastic party atmosphere in the cinema
Mr Z enjoyed taking part in the treasure hunt back in the cinema room, searching for the smurfs figurines among all the chairs and aisles, and having a look at all the Smurf toys which were out on display. There are two different play sets, a mushroom house and a beauty parlour, and loads of the small figurines of all the characters which would fit well in either set. There is also a 7.5″ Smurfette fashion doll which looks great, I would have loved that when I was little!
Soon it was time to go, but not before the Smurfy goodie bags
We got one of the character figures, which is the naughty Hackus (seen in the picture above), and he has been claimed by Mr T!
You can see more details of all the Smurfs toys here. They are available in stores now.
Thank to Norton and Co for the fun event! 🙂