A couple of thoughts crossed my mind while watching The Garfield Movie.  The first one was whether any of the small children in the audience knew who Garfield was before seeing this movie.  I became familiar with the character through the comics section of the Sunday newspaper.  Do ten year-olds today know what a comic strip is, let alone a Sunday newspaper?  I doubt that they do.  Social media, specifically TikTok, appears to be the preferred choice for short-form comedy bits these days.  Why would a child ever read a static, three-panel comic strip for a laugh when they can watch countless live-action videos instead?

Next, I realized how challenging it must be to make a movie out of a comic strip like Garfield.  Others, like Peanuts, The Addams Family or Dick Tracy came with an expansive world and a supporting cast of characters.  Garfield’s universe, however, consists of his home and a very small supporting cast: Garfield, Jon (Garfield’s owner), Odie (Garfield’s fellow pet) and Dr. Liz Wilson (a vet and Jon’s love interest).  Then there’s the matter of Garfield’s personality.  He’s a very simple character with traits that can be easily summed up in a few sentences.  He’s lazy, hates Mondays, has a voracious appetite, is frequently annoyed by Odie and takes advantage of Jon.  Having this character be the focus of a three-panel strip has worked fine for decades, but is not nuanced enough for a feature-length movie.

To overcome the thinness of the source material, the filmmakers behind The Garfield Movie apparently took a satirical joke in La La Land–one that skewers Hollywood’s incessant need to mine intellectual property–as career advice.  As you may recall, there’s a scene in that movie where Emma Stone’s character Mia is stuck in a dull conversation with a scriptwriter who brags about his knack for world-building.  When he was asked to write a movie about Goldilocks and the Three Bears, his brilliant response was to ask, “What if there was a fourth bear?”  Much to my amazement, The Garfield Movie is a real-world manifestation of that level of creativity.  After 45 years of daily comic strips, animated specials and two feature-length movies, the filmmakers asked themselves, “What if Garfield had a father?” and built an entire movie around answering that question without a shred of irony.

The Garfield Movie begins with Garfield’s (Chris Pratt) origin story, and how he came to be adopted by Jon (Nicholas Hoult, criminally underutilized).  It’s a cute scene that’s noticeably more genteel than the rest of the movie.  Then, after quickly cycling through a montage of Garfield-centric jokes, Garfield and Oide are kidnapped.  Why?  Because the movie needed a way to get Garfield out of the house.  This allows the movie to introduce a bunch of new characters, including Garfield’s long-absent father Vic (Samuel L. Jackson).

Jinx (a screechy Hannah Waddingham), is intent on getting revenge on Vic for letting her be captured during a heist at Lactose Farms.  Jinx gives Vic, Garfield and Odie an ultimatum: steal a milk truck from the farm to settle the score, or meet the great big litter box in the sky.  If you have to ask how two cats will steal a milk truck, let alone drive it, this movie is not for you.  Since neither Vic nor Garfield know how to pull off this sort of job, they enlist the help of Otto (Ving Rhames), a former milk mascot who was literally put out to pasture after the farm was acquired by a conglomerate.  Otto initially refuses to help them until Vic says that they will reunite him with his former love, Ethel.  Otto and Ethel used to be co-mascots until the conglomerate decided that all they needed was Ethel to push their product.  (This backstory didn’t make any sense to me, to be honest.)

After an extended Looney Tunes inspired training sequence, there’s an extended heist sequence.  (Ving Rhames, who played the radio guy in all of the Mission Impossible movies, does the same thing here.)  After several busy action sequences, Jinx is finally put back in her place.  The movie ends with an extended “coming together” moment between Garfield and Vic that only makes the movie feel longer than its 101 minute runtime.  (There’s no reason why this movie couldn’t have been a much tighter 90 minutes.)

What surprised me the most about Garfield is how almost everything that happens after the first five minutes or so isn’t about Garfield.  Instead, the movie pulls him into a storyline that quickly relegates him to being a secondary character for the remainder of the movie.  This could have worked if the movie retained Garfield’s grumpy personality and let him lob sarcastically comments from the sidelines.  (Think of how Bugs Bunny and all of the bizarre situations he was routinely plopped into.)  Unfortunately, this version of Garfield is friendly and cheerful to everyone around him, even Odie.

This Garfield is a hyper-slacker (or energetic goofball), the type of character Chris Pratt has become known for.  When I envisioned Garfield as the feline version of Star Lord, Pratt’s interpretation worked somewhat better.  Pratt is just unremarkable as a voice actor.  As his father Vic, Samuel L. Jackson is OK.  I found the idea of him voicing a cat to be funnier than anything that his character says or does in the movie.

When my attention drifted past the kinda sorta interesting Garfield to the other aspects of the movie, I found things that worked.  The bit about the streaming service called Catflix, that only plays cat videos, for example.  Then there was the phone app that translates cat-speak into English.  If there ever was a good reason for AI, that would be it.  The design of and vocal work behind the two hench-dogs, Roland (Brett Goldstein) and Nolan (Bowen Yang) was inspired.  I chuckled at how the movie transformed Odie into Grommet’s American cousin.  Having Ving Rhames lend his gravitas-filled voice to Otto the bull was a nice touch.  I liked how Jinx’s necklace doubled as a mood indicator and changed colors accordingly.  Did Cecily Strong voice Marge Malone, the farm’s animal control officer, to sound like Marge Gunderson from Fargo?  This odd assortment of characters helped me to stay with the movie while it went through its familiar and predictable paces.

As far as animated movies go, The Garfield Movie is well-drawn and colorful.  The rendering of the hair on Garfield and his father Vic was incredibly detailed, to the point where I was waiting for the movie to make a joke about “digital fur”.  (Remember Cats?)  The product placement in the movie was so overt that it made me laugh.  If your kids are suddenly interested in eating at The Olive Garden or shopping at Wal-Mart, you can blame this movie.  That aside, the movie is amusing and good-natured, a decent choice for small children.  It includes a smattering of things for adults to chuckle at, which certainly helps.  Mildly Recommended.