Released: 30th May
Seen: 30th June
In 1977, Jim Davis was working on a comic strip called “Jon” about a cartoonist named Jon Arbuckle and his cat Garfield. The strip had been called Jon for a year already but Jim smartly changed it to Garfield just before the strip would get printed nationally. It soon became an undeniable phenomenon, with the kind of merchandising that’s normally reserved for Sci-Fi epics and superheroes. It would go on to create a long-running beloved animated comedy called Garfield and Friends, a dozen animated specials, a second series that only finished airing in 2016 and two live-action movies that we try our best to forget. What hasn’t been tried yet is a full-length animated motion picture released in cinemas and now we have one… it’s fine.
The Garfield Movie follows the titular cat Garfield (Chris Pratt) on a relatively normal day where he bugs his owner Jon (Nicholas Hoult) for food, gets his dog Odie to do everything for him and in general just lounges about… until he’s kidnapped by a pair of dogs working for the evil Jinx (Hannah Waddingham) who kidnapped Garfield to lure his long-lost father Vic (Samuel Jackson) out. See, Jinx recently broke out of the pound where she was put after getting caught during a milk heist that she did alongside Vic and his crew and so she insists that Vic go steal a large amount of milk to even their debt. He also has to take Garfield with him because that amuses Jinx since Garfield clearly has some deep resentment towards his long-lost father… and also this film needs an emotional core so it’s going to make that core out of the relationship between the two cats. This turns into a cross-country trip full of wacky hijinks, adventure and the occasional joke, it’s all pretty much what one would expect when you saw the animation style.
It’d be fair to say that Garfield was a major part of my life growing up. I remember that long-running animated sitcom and any version of Garfield that isn’t voiced by Lorenzo Music feels wrong almost by default so already The Garfield Movie had a hurdle to climb over. To give The Garfield Movie its due praise, it can be pretty funny at times. Several of the jokes are honestly pretty good and feel like a broader version of what made the comic strip work, from a scene pontificating on Garfield’s hatred of Mondays to the occasional deadpan sarcastic retort, there’s a definite attempt to get the tone of the comedy right and it had moments where it hits the target. There’s more than a few moments where you can really feel like they get this character and get why he’s been an icon for over 40 years… and then you cut back to the whole “Cross country trip full of wacky hijinks” thing and realise that they didn’t fully get the memo.
The biggest problem with The Garfield Movie is that the plot doesn’t really feel like the kind of plot that works for Garfield… which is saying a lot if you remember those 12 specials. Having the film try to force this emotional story between Garfield and his long-lost father is one thing, that feels like something that works with Garfield as a character (Hell, we know it works, that’s basically the plot of the special Garfield on the Town which was the second animated special to feature the character) but then throwing in this secondary evil cat and a plot about breaking into a dairy farm feels less like Garfield and more like a generic animated film plot that would be more at home in something like Wonder Park instead of a Garfield cartoon. It turns the emotional story between Garfield and Vic into background work while the silly over-the-top stuff happens instead.
The second big problem The Garfield Movie has is that we have Chris Pratt doing another major voice role that he’s just not suited for. He managed to make Mario work, at least that time there was the excuse of the character needing to portray more complex emotions than one would expect from the video game voice so it made sense to switch it up and he found a take that legitimately worked to make his performance feel right… Garfield’s most recent voice actor was Frank Welker AKA Every animal sound you’ve ever heard in a movie, and you replaced THAT with Starlord? Chris Pratt just sounds like Chris Pratt here, there is nothing Garfield about that voice in any way and most of the time it’s insanely distracting. There are a few occasional moments when Pratt nails it and gets the specific yell or sarcastic tone just right but most of the time it’s hard to ignore that I’m just listening to Chris Pratt who was hired because his name is known enough to put on a poster. It’s also just weird to have him and Samuel Jackson playing father and son because he sounds nothing like Samuel Jackson. It’s casting done by what’d look good on the poster, not who was best for the role.
Now, to push the negativity aside for a second, it must be noted that The Garfield Movie is visually stunning (mostly). It operates on pure cartoon logic where physics means nothing and whatever works best for the joke is what’s put on screen. The 3D animation clearly does its best to honour the look of the comic in terms of framing and how the characters position themselves while delivering a joke, it feels like an attempt to copy what was done with The Peanuts Movie only without going as far as those guys did. Occasionally the film does break out of this and just does what any other animated comedy would do but there are enough moments that feel lifted right from the comic strip for it to be entertaining… and oh boy would I love it if I could let that be all I said about the visuals.
There’s strobing. Strobe lights, they’re hated around here for a reason and The Garfield Movie indulges in them for several scenes early in the film. It’s an obvious lightning simulation, dramatically revealing a main character through a flash of lightning but it’s done repeatedly enough and in full screen for long enough to get the classic warning that this has that lightning that can make people ill, certainly a lot less than other films I’ve warned about but enough that it probably should get the warning just in case.
All of this isn’t to say that The Garfield Movie is a bad movie, it’s perfectly fine as far as animated action comedies go. Its problem is that it doesn’t feel like Garfield should. If this is going to be a film that introduces kids to Garfield then sure, it’ll probably be a good entry point but there’s a certain specific tone that you associate with that glorious orange cat and this film rarely nails that tone. It’s clear that the people who make this film like and respect Garfield as a character with a long history, the nods to Lorenzo Music and Jim Davis hidden among the sets are enough evidence to show they have thought about that history but it doesn’t feel like they get the character. They certainly have an idea of what Garfield is, they know the central tropes (Lasagna, hates Mondays, annoys Jon) but the core of the character feels like it’s missing.
The Garfield Movie is certainly a step up from the 2 live-action films that came out ages ago and it’s certainly funny enough to do the job but it just can’t quite get to where it needs to go. It could just be that this film has the misfortune of existing in a world where the image of Garfield was set in amber back in the 80s thanks to those aforementioned specials and the series Garfield and Friends, those knew what made the character so beloved and this just doesn’t. It’s still funny, it’s still exciting, it’s not like it’s a bad movie… it’s just not a Garfield movie, despite the fact it’s named after and stars a cat named Garfield.
Movie Meister Reviews 