With nothing of note coming out this weekend, I decided to take my niece to see The Garfield Movie since I saw Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga a week ago instead of the one about everyone’s favorite comic strip feline.  The Garfield Movie should not be confused with 2004’s Garfield: The Movie wherein Bill Murray voices the titular character.  If you watch Zombieland (2009), Murray, who plays himself, says with his dying breath that his one regret was being in a part animated, part live-action version of Garfield.  If there is nothing else that this Catholic reviewer can say that is positive about this film from this point forward, it is that at least with The Garfield Movie they stuck with animation.  It did not mean a hill of beans to a predictable, sleep-inducing plot, but already I am not being Christ-like in my approach to the film.  At least I did not hate the experience?  Or maybe it was just the fact that my niece enjoyed it and that made it tolerable?

The eponymous cat (voiced by Chris Pratt) in The Garfield Movie tells you right away why he is the poster-feline for gluttony, one of the seven cardinal sins identified by the Catholic Church, sometimes known as the seven deadly sins.  As he gives us the backstory of how he became Jon Arbuckle’s (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) pet, Garfield orders enough food to feed a small family . . . reunion.  By the way, try not to think about the mechanics of a cat snatching its owner’s credit card and phone to make such purchases.  As it arrives, we see a flashback that touched (a tiny bit) my Franciscan heart as Garfield is left in an alleyway by his father, Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson).  With the rain, and the inviting scent of an Italian restaurant across the street, they combine to entice the kitten in the direction of sustenance.  Jon sees the supposedly helpless Garfield outside, and opens the window to let the little one inside.  Garfield proceeds to go on a gluttonous feeding rampage, eating most of the food in the restaurant he eyes.  And this is what convinces Jon to take Garfield home?  Actually, it was the kitten’s large, pleading eyes and every indication of being alone, but the feeding frenzy is intense.  At any rate, it leads to a stable, if one-sided pet-owner relationship, with Garfield feeling like everything Jon and the dog, Odie (voiced by Harvey Guillén), do revolves around the cat and his appetite.  Indeed, aside from terrible Mondays, everything is going well until one night Garfield and Odie get up for a midnight snack.  As they survey the refrigerator’s contents, they are snatched by Nolan (voiced by Bowen Yang) and Rolan (voiced by Brett Goldstein).  These two dogs work for Jinx (voiced by Hannah Waddingham), a white cat from England who fell on hard times after coming to the United States and not making her way in showbusiness.  Right.  Her situation went from bad to worse when she fell in with a gang led by Vic.  As they flee from stealing milk from the Lactose Farm factory, she gets left behind and is caught by animal control, spending more than four years in the shelter.  The only way she escaped was with the help of Nolan and Rolan.  Her capturing Garfield and Odie had been part of an elaborate (and it gets more elaborate) ruse to lure in Vic.  Once there, with her canine muscle, she forces Vic to pilfer over 1,600 quarts of milk from Lactose Farm, one for each day she spent in the pound.  Garfield and Odie must help because, I guess, they are there.  Hence, while Jon gets nowhere with a lost pets hotline, our two cats and a dog head off by train to the location of the milk factory.  Once there, they enlist the help of Otto (voiced by Ving Rhames), the bull to the cow that is Ethel (voiced by Alicia Grace Turrell), the bovine faces of Lactose Farms.  Otto had been kicked off Lactose property when the business corporatized, and now he stares longingly below, looking for glimpses of Ethel.  In exchange for getting insight into how to retrieve the amount of milk they are after, Otto expects them to free Ethel for him.  Of course, the plan does not go as expected, and Vic ends up driving away the truck with the necessary supplies, leaving Garfield and Odie to be picked up by animal control.  Meanwhile, Vic is stopped by an angry Jinx, who had wanted him to be where Garfield and Odie landed.  As for the two pets, they are happy to be home until Garfield is reminded that Vic is not the terrible father Garfield had built him up to be.  With this in mind, Garfield hatches another intricate plot to save Vic from Jinx’s claws.  In classic villain fashion, I guess, Jinx has decided to throw Vic from a train, and somehow Garfield guesses this, too.  Despite Garfield’s improbable planning, in the end they have to be saved by Otto.  Because of this, Garfield, Odie, and Vic fulfill their promise to free Ethel, trading Jinx as the mastermind behind the Lactose Farms break in for the cow.  After a long night’s work, Garfield, Odie, and Vic return home, with Vic refusing Garfield’s invitations to stay with Jon citing being an outside cat.  Once more, it takes Odie to be the bark, not voice, of reason, convincing Garfield to go after his father.  Jon seems to be on board with all this, and they live happily ever after.

I hope that you can forgive any snarkiness on my part in talking about The Garfield Movie in the last paragraph.  While walking out of the theater with my niece, she asked my opinion of it, and I tried to dance around the subject because I knew she liked it.  What is clear is that it is not aimed at me, and that is okay.  The Bible tells us to be childlike before God, and I have a hard time doing that when trying to analyze kid’s movies.  Any adult knows that it is impossible to translate our pets’ vocalizations into recognizable speech, but to an adolescent, such things can be funny.  If I may build the movie up somewhat, it would be to allude to something I said in the introduction.  I appreciated the fact that they made this animated.  It goes beyond this simple fact, however.  One of the film’s producers is Jim Davis.  If that name is not familiar to you, he is the creator of the original Garfield comic strip.  He premiered the character in 1978, and since then his popularity has grown to be a worldwide phenomenon, printed in many newspapers globally.  While print media is increasingly becoming a relic, I can at least remember buying the paper mostly for three reasons: comics, crossword puzzles, and the sports page.  With the first of those sections, Garfield was always one that I read.  For nostalgia, if nothing else, I was happy to see that the art style used in the latest cinematic version was more in line with what I would have seen in the St. Petersburg Times, or the Tampa Bay Times as it is known today.  Nostalgia can be a tricky thing in regards to Faith, but this is an innocent example.

Speaking of Faith, an aspect alluded to in my synopsis of The Garfield Movie is how my Franciscan heart was stirred by the scenes of the young feline in the rain outside the Italian restaurant.  I say “Franciscan heart” because St. Francis of Assisi is the patron saint of animals.  It also helps that the twelfth and thirteenth century Italian holy man is my Confirmation saint.  Because of this, when it comes to seeing animals in difficulty, be they animated or real, I tend to have an emotional response.  They are wholly innocent creatures, and like all life, they deserve a chance to continue on this planet.  You can be nitpicky and throw meat consumption in my face, but to that I would respond by pointing out that there are many religious orders within the Church that either eat very little flesh, or are completely vegetarian.  Also, the difference is in intent.  Seeing an animal in distress, either because of human cruelty or unforeseen circumstances, is not the same as another raised in an agricultural setting.  Besides, the Bible, in the Acts of the Apostles, lifts many of the mosaic dietary restrictions.  Getting back to helping animals in need, while seeing Garfield get the assistance he needs is all well and good, Vic’s similar attitudes are also highlighted.  The reason Garfield felt abandoned by his father is because in that same moment just referenced, Vic had gone off to find food for his son.  Vic had to wait until a human having a conversation by a trash can went inside before finding a tiny fish in the garbage.  Vic had intended to give the morsel to Garfield, never mind dad’s hunger.  Ultimately, this is the essence of St. Francis’ patronage.  He was given this title because of a sermon he gave to birds, finding them a more attentive audience than people.  They embodied the kind of innocence to which we are called, and that we witness in the tiny Garfield.

Then again, as we repeatedly see in The Garfield Movie, the titular character complicates our view of him as innocent with his gluttony.  It all makes for a rather predictable movie experience that, as I said, had me fighting to keep my eyes open.  Yet, your kids might like it, and that is always worth something.