Since Garfield’s debut in the 1970s, Jim Davis’s orange tabby has become one of the most successful brands to evolve from the humble American comic strip. And fortified by a reliable stream of cartoon shows, video games and a couple of bland Bill Murray-voiced films in the early 2000s, Garfield is now one of the more enduring images of the American imagination.
Even if you’ve never consumed Garfield in any prolonged form, you probably know who he is and what he represents. (Mondays: reviled. Lasagna: beloved. Effort of any kind: a fundamental misunderstanding of life.)
It’s particularly odd, then, that the latest iteration of the Garfield empire, the animated “The Garfield Movie,” somehow doesn’t. The film, directed by Mark Dindal, is an inert adaptation that mostly tries to skate by on its namesake. In other words, it’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all.
Part of this can be attributed to the voice — Chris Pratt, an overly spunky casting choice that was doomed from the start — but there’s also a built-in defect to the very concept of the big-screen Garfield treatment. An animated, animal-centric children’s movie tends to require a narrative structure of action-packed adventure, — the antithesis of Garfield the cat’s raison d’être.
Instead, after a perfunctory origin story of Garfield’s life with his owner, Jon (Nicholas Hoult), and dog companion, Odie (Harvey Guillén), the film is quickly set into adventure mode when Garfield and Odie are kidnapped by a pair of henchman dogs working for a vengeful cat named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham). Garfield’s estranged father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), quickly comes to the rescue, but it’s Vic that Jinx is really after. After Jinx demands a truck full of milk as payment for a botched job she took the fall for, Vic, with Garfield and Odie in tow, are off to find a way to pay his debt.
Vic is a new addition to the lore. (Garfield’s father wasn’t present in the many media iterations, save for a few passing mentions.) He abandoned Garfield as a kitten in an alley, and their relationship is strained. This Garfield, aside from the predictable references here and there to his gluttony, is mostly an agitated son who chafes at his dad’s sudden presence in his life.
Even before all of this is set in motion, Garfield is introduced with too much pep in his step by Pratt, who has become, for better or worse, blockbuster animation’s go-to lead (“The Lego Movie,” “Onward,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie”). His voice acting, though, lacks the dynamism to embody a memorable character like Garfield. His golden retriever, himbo energy can work in specific situations, like “The Lego Movie,” but here it’s the inverse of what Garfield ought to be. Bill Murray, Garfield’s voice in the earlier films, felt genuinely well suited to the cat’s languor, even if the movies were rough.
Granted, Pratt isn’t helped along elsewhere. The animation is visually flat, with compositions that seem oddly half-populated and cheap. The script, by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove and David Reynolds, is weak, with most of its comedy derived from cheap slapstick violence that even kids may tire of, and emotional beats that were written on autopilot.
This is all the more disappointing considering that in 2000, Dindal directed one of the more comically daring big-budget animated works: Disney’s “The Emperor’s New Groove.” That film opened with a fourth-wall-breaking introduction from its protagonist, just as in this “Garfield”; in “The Emperor’s New Groove,” it foreshadowed the tone of an idiosyncratic work, but here it just reads as lazy.
More cynical viewers might see the film as simply a flotation device for ads, considering the constant product placement. In all his indolence, even Garfield would have dragged himself up to change the channel.
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