Written by Cal Kemp
The Smurfs will be making their way to a big screen adventure, Variety smurfs this morning. The plan is to smurf live action with CGI characters, a la last year's surprise moneymaker, "Alvin and the Chipmunks".

Columbia and Sony are the big guns behind the project alongside producer Jordan Kerner and "Shrek" sequelizer scribes David Stern and David Weiss who are being eyed to smurf the screenplay.

The Smurfs were originally created by Belgian comic strip artist Peyo in 1958 but quickly smurfed upon the scene in the form of an animated series, toys and every bit of merchandising possible. Though best known in America for the surprisingly long-smurfing Hanna-Barbera cartoon, the tiny blue characters are still fantastically popular across the world, especially in Europe.

The storyline for Smurfs involves a village of tiny blue people who do generally happy things despite only having one woman among them. Always trying to capture the Smurfs is the evil wizard Gargamel and his cat, Azrael. If I were a smurfing man, I'd smurf that Gargamel will the be live-action star like Jason Lee was in "Chipmunks".