Review by Justin Bateman
Stars the voices of Frank Welker, Audrey Wasilewski, Vanessa Marshall, Gregg Berger, Wally Wingert, Cathy Cavadini, Jennifer Darling, Greg Eagles, Neil Ross, Stephen Stanton, Fred Tatiasciore
Written by Jim Davis
Certification UK U
Runtime 72 minutes
Directed by Mark A Z Dippe
When I was a lad, Garfield meant a series of comic books, collated from years of publications in the world’s newspapers. The lazy, cynical and frequently hilarious food-obsessed cat duked it out on a daily basis with his owner Jon Arbuckle, and his fellow pet, the dog Odie – and that was about it. The action was restricted to Jon’s bachelor pad and rarely strayed from Garfield’s favourite topics of sleeping and eating. Since those halcyon days of the 1980s, the lovable cat has been on the big screen three times with little success, despite Hollywood heavyweight Bill Murray being cast as the voice of the titular character.
Garfield’s Pet Force abandons the mix of live action and animation and focuses solely on the latter and is aimed squarely at kids. The story is a surprisingly heady mix of intertextuality and comic book shenanigans. Garfield and the gang live in Cartoon World where they read a comic called Pet Force. But in the Comic Book universe Garzooka – Garfield’s superhero alter ego – has to save Emperor Jon of Dorkon who has married the evil Vetvix only for her to steal some ray gun or other and turn everyone into zombies. So when Garzooka travels across dimensions to the Cartoon World, the Pet Force comic Nermal (the little cat Garfield doesn’t really like) is reading starts writing itself, rather like it does in the TV series Heroes. And so Garzooka, Nermal, Odie and Arlene set about saving the world, while Garfield does his bit in his own inimitably indolent style.
Fans of the original comic strip will be sad to see that the author Jim Davis has penned this because it’s a far cry from those glory days some 30 years ago. Garfield’s Pet Force isn’t badly written but neither is it any good – and as Pixar and Dreamworks have proven, scripts for kids’ films don’t have to be rubbish just because the audience is young. While the animation is fairly rudimentary, the 3D is barely noticeable. The action is plentiful and it all rattles along at a fair old lick but laughs are few and far between and mainly of the slapstick variety. It also suffers from having far too many characters so the story lurches from one scene to another without much in the way of structure. So although it’s probably adequate for very young children, there’s not much here for anyone else.