Movies: The Garfield Movie

Sony Pictures’ mixed cartoon based on the Jim Davis comic strip mildly entertains

With three screenwriters, Sony’s Garfield Movie lacks cohesion. It’s a mixed bag. Cutesy cat and pet cliches are woven and integrated—also playfully changed—as the Monday-hating, lasagna-loving indoor cat comic strip character (created by Jim Davis and neatly if uncurmudgeonly voiced here by Chris Pratt) is kidnapped by a villainess that rips off the sea beast Ursula from Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

That character—a wildly, deliriously mentally unstable female—adds an interesting and decidedly divergent twist on Hollywood’s dogma that females must be portrayed as perennially benign and deserving of more power than males. Another butch female character, too, comes under that guise, though she’s partly redeemable. That and the dog character, Odie, being smarter than all the cat characters combined, afford an entertaining deviation from the usual cat, pet and dog lore.

But the frenzy of modern movies aimed at kids—loud, crashing noises, slapstick and commercial tie-in type flash and plot points that have no relevance and take the audience out of the movie abound. Digs at healthy food get stale and messaging about large or fat bodies being acceptable gets to feel like proselytizing. Still, Garfield gets an unexpected reunion with his long-lost father, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. Romantic subplotting and animation of emotional scenes between Garfield’s human owner and the orange cat add to a decent picture. You can wait to watch The Garfield Movie, which does not depict the ironic character as curmudgeonly, at home.