Garfield (2004)
Directed by Peter Hewitt
Garfield, the fat, lazy, lasagna lover, has everything a cat could want. But when Jon, in an effort to impress the Liz - the vet and an old high-school crush - adopts a dog named Odie and brings him home, Garfield gets the one thing he doesn't want. Competition.
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Highlights include a dance-off between Garfield and Odie to a Black-Eyed Peas song, a wild ride through airducts and stairs as Garfield tries to find Odie, and some just-to-keep-the-parents-awake references to Jerry Maguire, Apocalypse Now, Elvis, Billy Joel, and even Shakespeare's Henry V.
Unsure what audience to play to, the writers throw in a little bit of everything, from ho-hum slapstick to bad puns to an "Apocalypse Now" reference that's sure to delight the 8-year-old Francis Ford Coppola aficionados in the audience.
“Garfield” is being released with a short cartoon featuring Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel from “Ice Age,” called “Gone Nutty” that is an entertaining diversion an homage to the little critter’s acorns.
If you go to Garfield: The Movie, you'll also get to see ''Gone Nutty,'' a digitally animated 2002 short from the creators of ''Ice Age.''
Small wonder that most viewers will find considerably more laughs in the brief "Gone Nutty" cartoon (starring the scheming Scrat of "Ice Age" fame) that precedes "Garfield" than they'll get from the feature itself.
You might think that advances in technology might have improved on the conversing camels from 1942's Road to Morocco and those were deliberately cartoonish but you'll find no evidence of progress here.
The hand-me-down story line borrows from "101 Dalmatians," "Toy Story 2" and the animal pound interlude of "Lady and the Tramp."
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The hand-me-down story line borrows from "101 Dalmatians," "Toy Story 2" and the animal pound interlude of "Lady and the Tramp."
Director John Lasseter worked with a team of screenwriters, which included Buffy guru Joss Whedon, future Pixar Oscar winners Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WALL•E) and Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc., Up), Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow (who would go on to collaborate on decidedly lesser future projects like the Garfield movies and Daddy Day Camp), and Disney veteran Joe Ranft (who had contributed story material to both Beauty & the Beast and The Lion King) to craft a story that is both familiar and unique.
It comes as little surprise that Cohen and Sokolow (both of whom co-wrote Toy Story) have penned the film's screenplay, as the film's structure eerily echoes that Pixar hit.
Bill Murray's ("Lost in Translation") sardonic drawl is the perfect voice for Jim Davis' long running comic strip creation, but his wit is not matched by screenwriters Joel Cohen & Alec Sokolow ("Toy Story"), who strain milking laughs from pop cultural references and the repetitive observations of Davis himself.
…disinterest by “Toy Story” scribes Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow, and directed by Peter Hewitt, whose previous contribution to world cinema was “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.”
To say that the film borrows liberally from the Toy Story films for its plot would be a bit like comparing the cumulative differences between amoebae with a view from space; a self-professed master of his domain finds his top-shelf position threatened by an over-eager newcomer, and eventually acquiesces to his companionship after a daring rescue has been played out.
Although when his new rival gets lost -- then kidnapped by a tacky TV pet-trick showman (Stephen Tobolowsky) -- Garfield feels guilty because he let Odie out of the house, and the cat reluctantly mounts a rescue mission that bears more than a passing resemblance to the plot of "Toy Story 2."
Incidentally, Odie's capture and rescue also anchored the plot of Garfield's first animated half-hour special, "Here Comes Garfield."
In this movie, he’s a fully grown Siamese cat that acts as Garfield’s low-rent side kick and talks with a voice more annoying than John Leguizamo’s sloth in “Ice Age.”
“Garfield” is being released with a short cartoon featuring Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel from “Ice Age,” called “Gone Nutty” that is an entertaining diversion an homage to the little critter’s acorns.
If you go to Garfield: The Movie, you'll also get to see ''Gone Nutty,'' a digitally animated 2002 short from the creators of ''Ice Age.''
Small wonder that most viewers will find considerably more laughs in the brief "Gone Nutty" cartoon (starring the scheming Scrat of "Ice Age" fame) that precedes "Garfield" than they'll get from the feature itself.
The few moments of delight associated with this misbegotten film come in the jubilant opening short subject, a mini-sequel to 2002's animated feature "Ice Age." Scrat, the acorn-crazy, saber-toothed squirrel, amasses a huge hoard of nuts for the long prehistoric winter, but finds it impossible to keep them from rolling away.
That computer-animated, Oscar-nominated short, which features the prehistoric rodent Scrat from "Ice Age," is everything the "Garfield" feature is not.
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Instead, director Peter Hewitt ("The Borrowers") simply pummels the final creative breath out of a comic strip empire.
The movie also comes as an unhappy surprise because in 1997 the director, Peter Hewitt, made a pretty decent family picture from Mary Norton's novel "The Borrowers."
What we get, from director Peter Hewitt (“The Borrowers”), is a straightforward adaptation of Jon Davis’s popular feline character’s antics that combines pretty slick CGI with live action.
Highlights include a dance-off between Garfield and Odie to a Black-Eyed Peas song, a wild ride through airducts and stairs as Garfield tries to find Odie, and some just-to-keep-the-parents-awake references to Jerry Maguire, Apocalypse Now, Elvis, Billy Joel, and even Shakespeare's Henry V.