There’s not that much to Garfield. Understanding the orange tabby of funny-pages repute is pretty simple: he has a set of integral, inalienable traits – his ill temperament, his cynical outlook, his sedentary lifestyle, his motivation primarily in self-interest and his indifference to owner Jon Arbuckle – that define the grouchy yet likable pop-cultural fixture. Any depiction of a Garfield that eschews these qualities, even while adhering to such superficial markers as his love of lasagne or hatred of Mondays, ceases to be Garfield at all and instead becomes a common cat by any other name, no different than Get Fuzzy’s Bucky, or worse, the godless bastard Heathcliff. In fact, insofar as Garfield-ness is inscribed from the feline personality model projected on to cats by humans, a Garfield in spite of himself may as well be a dog, an unnatural oxymoron with nothing to distinguish himself from the rest of the herd.
The makers of The Garfield Movie chose not to heed this ontological lesson in their approach to Jim Davis’s blueprint. The all-new, all-animated vehicle for the newspaper comic-strip fixture mutates him into an on-trend, readily marketable rebrand of himself. Given slightly larger eyes and a slightly smaller mouth to up the cuteness factor on some of his expression models, this Garfield has softened his rougher edges, even going so far as to relax his staunch anti-Odie stance. To be fair, director Mark Dindal and the writing brain trust of Paul Kaplan, Mark Torgove and David Reynolds had to do something, the source material’s premise of “lazy a-hole cat mostly just sits around” fighting the narrative needs of cinema. But audiences have spent decades of mornings with Garfield. We know Garfield. Garfield is a friend of ours. Senator, Chris Pratt is no Garfield.
