Garfield Rips Off Garfield

Garfield is to comics what Folgers is to coffee: a convenient and accessible facsimile of the real experience. Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, did not set out to write a character that would bring people joy or anything unquantifiable like that. He wanted a way to sell merchandize through a marketable mascot with a finite set of easily-identifiable traits and jokes: cat, lazy, hates Mondays, loves Italian food. Mix and match ad infinitum.

As such, we should never expect originality from Garfield stories. But we should still expect a bit of effort because when we don’t, we get The Garfield Movie that “borrows” its central plot from the 1983 TV special Garfield on the Town in a locked, incestuous cycle of quasi-plagiarism that really hammers in the parallels between Garfield and Folgers.

In Garfield on the Town, the feline patron of diabetes gets separated from Jon, runs into a cat gang, and reunites with his estranged mother who admits that she’s been secretly watching him and being thankful that he has a better life than anything she could have provided. It’s actually somewhat touching in places and it also reveals that Garfield has a brother, Ràoul, voiced by Norm from Cheers. So if a franchise absolutely had to rip itself off, a story like that wouldn’t be the worst choice as long as you kept it simple and stayed away from schmaltzy sentimentality that could only ever come off as emotionally dishonest. That was the setup. The punchline is the entirety of The Garfield Movie.

The 2024 film starring Chris Pratt has like four different plots, but the chief ones include Garfield reuniting with his estranged father (Samuel L. Jackson) and going up against a gang led by a criminal cat (Hannah Waddingham). In the end, we learn that Vic has been secretly watching his son and being thankful that he has a better life than anything he could have provided. But before that we get tons of scenes of baby Garfield designed for ultimate cuteness/marketability in the kind of soulless manipulation that we haven’t seen since David Tennant as The Purple Man on Jessica Jones.

We did see a younger Garfield in On the Town but he was basically the same shape only smaller. Plus, that movie ended on a somewhat somber note. Knowing he would never fit with his mom’s street lifestyle, Garfield leaves her without any waterworks or needlessly prolonged goodbyes. In the new movie, it’s just an entire thing that ends with Vic moving in with Garfield and Jon. Yeah, sorry for the spoiler but if you’re watching Garfield for the plot, your life literally cannot get any worse, so it’s not like I did any damage there.

Garfield on the Town is probably as serious as you can take the story of an overweight orange cat, but The Garfield Movie tried to do more with it, ultimately and somewhat ironically ending up with less. And there’s absolutely no question that the 1983 special “influenced” the plot of the CGI movie seeing as some of Vic’s criminal pals are dead ringers for the cat gangsters from On the Town.

If that was all, the movie could still earn a lukewarm “If you don’t have anything better to do” recommendation. A rip-off of a good thing can still have a place in this world. The problem is that On the Town is 24 minutes-long. So, to fill the 90-minute runtime of The Garfield Movie, the production had to look for other inspirations, sprinkling the plot with a generic heist flick, a half-assed message of anti-corporatism that doesn’t go anywhere, and a character who looks like she walked off the set of Wallace and Gromit and acts like the Javert-esque Animal Control lady from Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.

Weirder still, The Garfield Movie has a surprising tech fetish. The movie opens with Garfield ordering food from an app and is dotted with front-and-center showcases of modern conveniences like “Catflix,” Peloton bikes, Roombas, delivery drones, and an animal-to-human translation app, which are crucial to the plot. Maybe the hope was to put the audience in a 21^st-century state of mind so they wouldn’t start thinking back to the past and remember, hey… we’ve seen this plot before.