UNICEF has produced a short Smurfs movie in which the Smurf village is bombed into rubble, leaving behind dead and dying Smurfs in a scene reminiscent of an Hieronymus Bosch painting. The video is part of a public education campaign on the ravages of war.
The short film pulls no punches. It opens with the Smurfs dancing, hand-in-hand, around a campfire and singing the Smurf song. Bluebirds flutter past and rabbits gambol around their familiar village of mushroom- shaped houses until, without warning, bombs begin to rain from the sky.
Tiny Smurfs scatter and run in vain from the whistling bombs, before being felled by blast waves and fiery explosions. The final scene shows a scorched and tattered Baby Smurf sobbing inconsolably, surrounded by prone Smurfs.
The final frame bears the message: “Don’t let war affect the lives of children…”
“We wanted something that was real war – Smurfs losing arms, or a Smurf losing a head -but they said no.”
(Thanks, Stefan, Bonnie and Jamais!)
Update: There’s a slideshow of stills from the video, along with the audio track, here in Quicktime and WMV. If anyone has a link to a non-streaming, non-WMV-only version of this file, please let me know (I’m not interested in the WMV-only streams since they seem to be impervious to playback in VLC and mPlayer, and WMP for OS X is a steaming, unusable pile)