“His frustrations are universal,” says director Mark Dindal, who helms our lazy and sarcastic hero’s first fully animated big-screen adventure with The Garfield Movie. “He reminds people of their childhoods – reading him in the Sunday paper or seeing the specials. The visual humor will always play. You can find Garfield comics from 15, 20, 30 years ago, and they don’t feel dated because they’re never really rooted in something specific to that time period.”
After nearly 50 years of comic strip stardom and hilarious TV specials, the movie brings together everything that audiences love about Garfield.
Garfield is a cat…a big lazy cat…a quick-witted comedic cat…a non-exercising-lasagna-loving cat, a prone-to-food-coma cat, so don’t judge him if he doesn’t meet your high human standards. Garfield is the furred distillation of humanity’s collective desire to do absolutely nothing…all day long…like we all wish we could. An icon of do-nothingness, Garfield hates Mondays and work. Food is his love language, and he speaks it fluently, along with its many dialects. He hates spiders and loves coffee. Contrary to popular belief, Garfield frequently exercises. His favorite workouts are walking from the fridge to the couch, turning over in the bed, lifting his fork and chewing food. He lives a perfectly pampered life in the burbs with his owner Jon and unpaid intern, Odie.
Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis, says that he created the character to stand in contrast with the many dogs that were ruling the comics page at the time. “I saw a lot of dogs doing very well – Snoopy, Marmaduke, Fred Basset, you name it,” he says. “But there were no cats at the time. And I grew up on a farm with about 25 cats on average, and so I knew and loved cats. I thought, ‘Well, if dogs are doing that well, maybe I could use a cat.’ Cats are kind of standoffish – you know where your dog stands, but cats are aloof.”
Because of that, he says, “it’s natural to attribute human thoughts and feelings to cats. Garfield is a human being in a cat suit.” Indeed, Davis says that Garfield’s staying power comes in the fact that his millions of fans recognize themselves in his foibles. Cats – they’re just like us! “I hold a mirror to the reader and show them back with a humorous twist,” says Davis. “We’re made to feel guilty for overeating, not exercising, and oversleeping. Garfield relieves our guilt by enjoying all of those things.” And Davis says that every aspect of the strip was centered around that – including the character design. “I wanted to create a cat that, outwardly, looked like his personality: lazy, self-centered, and hungry,” he says.
“You know Garfield loves lasagna and hates Mondays, but he’s never had this kind of adventure until now,” says Chris Pratt, who voices everyone’s favorite curmudgeonly housecat. “This is a 2024 Garfield. As the world has evolved, so too has Garfield, and his perfectly pampered life has become even more easy,” Pratt continues. “He’s become even lazier because he can order his lasagna with a simple click of a button. There’s nothing bad about his life except for Mondays. But in this movie, he’s going to be forced to get out of his house and go on an adventure that he is entirely unprepared for – and he’ll have to rise to the occasion… and through all of that, we’ll see how and why he got to be the way he is. This is about what makes Garfield Garfield.”
The screenplay is by Paul A. Kaplan & Mark Torgove and David Reynolds. Based on the Garfield® characters created by Jim Davis
Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt), the world-famous, Monday-hating, lasagna-loving indoor cat, is about to have a wild outdoor adventure! After an unexpected reunion with his long-lost father – scruffy street cat Vic (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) – Garfield and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered life into joining Vic in a hilarious, high-stakes heist.
In creating the film and mining the story for comedy, The Garfield Movie is a reunion for Dindal and co-screenwriter Dave Reynolds
Dindal and Reynolds first teamed in those roles on the animated comedy The Emperor’s New Groove – a meme-ready cult classic with fans that declare it one of the funniest movies of the last quarter-century.
The film is produced by John Cohen, who previously shepherded Despicable Me and Angry Birds to the screen, and by Alcon Entertainment’s Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson, whose success with films for the entire family to enjoy includes The Blind Side and the Dolphin Tale films.
Kosove says that he and Johnson were equally pleased to be producing the film, because they felt that Garfield deserved a proper, fully animated big-screen treatment that captured the character and also gave him room to grow. “Alcon is a company with success in family films, because we like to make movies for families, not just for kids,” says Kosove. “The Garfield Movie is really a film for the entire family. There are emotional stakes and characters you care about – and of course hijinks and physical comedy.”
To show those emotional stakes, says Johnson, it was necessary for the cynical cat to show some kind of growth (and not just around the middle). “Garfield’s snark and cynicism is funny and effective in a three-panel comic,” he notes. “In a movie, one has to have that character have some degree of growth in spite of himself. You have to root for him.”
For Cohen, the chance to work with a favorite character is the culmination of a childhood fantasy. “I still can’t believe that I was lucky enough to get to make a Garfield movie,” says Cohen. “I must have pinched myself every day over the last few years. I was a kid who had Garfield and Pooky stuffed animals, a Garfield phone, the classic McDonald’s mugs – I even used to draw my own Garfield comics with Odie, Jon, and the awesome cast of characters. It’s such an honor that Jim Davis entrusted us to be custodians of his creation – there’s nothing that has made me happier than to hear his joy and enthusiastic reactions to the film over the course of production.”
For his part, Davis says he was thrilled to see an animated film break Garfield out of his three-panel confines. “It goes without saying that Garfield gets out and around more in animation. Otherwise, why animate him?” says the character’s creator. “Garfield has the same personality in both mediums. However, since animation is more than three frames, Garfield must get involved with a plot demanding that he leave his bed. In many ways, animation is easier to work with than a comic strip, because in a comic strip you have to set up the story, twist it and then resolve it in only three or four frames, and in 25 words or less. In animation, you have the luxury of time to tell the story, plus you get to use music, sound effects, and audible dialog to execute the gags and drive the story.”
For Dindal and his team, the process began with research into what makes Garfield Garfield – and finding the places where the character can grow and change. With many thousands of Garfield strips that have entertained millions for decades, the task may have seemed daunting, but fortunately, it was easier than ever to go back and find those classic Garfield gags. “When we started to make the movie, we had access to a database that had all of the comic strips archived,” he recalls. “You could put in a keyword like ‘Garfield eating lasagna’ or ‘Garfield hugs Odie’ and it would bring up all of these terrific comic strips that we could reference. That was a huge resource for us, to find ideas that would connect to the comic strips that the fans would relate to. It was so well organized, and it really sped up our development process to be able to reference those in that way.”
And in this movie, Garfield gets into trouble like never before. Up until now, the worst he’s ever had to face is a tummy ache from too much lasagna (is there even such a thing?) or a particularly terrible Monday (is there any other kind?) … but in the movie, Garfield and Odie are pulled out of their house and dropped smack dab into the middle of the biggest milk heist that ever was. Call it Ocean’s 2%.
“This movie is about an indoor cat – a lazy, pampered, self-centered indoor cat – who is forced out of his comfort zone into a crazy adventure in the outside world,” says Cohen. “He’s totally ill-equipped to survive without the creature comforts of hot meals-on-demand, his La-Z-Boy chair, blanket, and remote control. There was so much opportunity for comedy in this fish-out-of-water scenario, especially with an arrogant character who’s stuck in his ways and thinks he knows better than anyone else. We had a ton of fun imagining endless possibilities for the laziest cat in the world at the center of a heist movie.”
Dindal says that Garfield’s incredible – and incredibly unearned – self-confidence is going to get him into hot water. “With any challenge, Garfield’s attitude is, how hard can it be?” Dindal continues. “So, when he goes into the outside world, he’s never intimidated. He’s sure that everything is going to go smoothly. That was a lot of fun to play with, especially as we exaggerated the stakes to absurd, life-or-death levels.”
MARK DINDAL (director) was fascinated by animation at the age of six and got to realize a dream when he was trained by veteran Disney artists at California Institute of the Arts. He was recruited by Disney Studios after his second year at CalArts and began his career in the Effects Animation department on The Fox and the Hound. He continued animating effects on Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Mickey’s Christmas Carol. He was the Visual Effects Supervisor on The Little Mermaid. In 1991, he was given the opportunity to animate and direct a short piece of animation in Disney’s The Rocketeer. From there he went on to his directorial debut on Cats Don’t Dance for Warner Bros., which won the 1997 Annie Award for Best Animated Feature. He returned to Disney to develop and direct both the cult favorite The Emperor’s New Groove and Disney’s first CG feature, Chicken Little.
The writing team of PAUL A. KAPLAN & MARK TORGROVE (screenplay) have a television career spanning over two decades, with writer/producer credits on numerous hit shows including “Raising Hope” (FOX), “George Lopez” (ABC), “Just Shoot Me” (NBC), and “Spin City” (ABC). In the feature space, they have sold original scripts and rewritten projects for studios including Warner Bros., Disney, Sony Pictures, and Universal. They also penned the comedy-drama The Late Bloomer, based on journalist Ken Baker’s autobiography.
DAVID REYNOLDS (screenplay) was one of the original writers on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” After 400+ shows, he moved to Los Angeles and began working on Tarzan for Walt Disney Feature Animation. During this, the Disney execs introduced him to a new little-known animation studio named Pixar (Toy Story would be released later that year), who hired him to help develop their second feature, A Bug’s Life. For the next decade, he worked on (almost) every Disney or Pixar animated movie in production, including writing the screenplay for The Emperor’s New Groove as well as co-writing Finding Nemo. He was nominated for an Oscar® and BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay for Finding Nemo, as well as a BAFTA for New Groove.
Cartoonist, author, producer, director, president, founder, screenwriter, environmentalist, philanthropist — all these titles can be used to describe JIM DAVIS (Based on the Garfield® characters created by), best-known as the creator of “Garfield.” He was born July 28, 1945 in Marion, Indiana, and raised on a small farm with his parents, Jim and Betty Davis, and his younger brother, Dave (Doc). Like most farms, the barnyard had its share of stray cats; about 25 at one time, by Jim’s estimation. As a child, he suffered serious bouts with asthma and was often bedridden. Forced inside, away from regular farm chores, he whiled away the hours drawing pictures. In college, he studied art and business before going to work for “Tumbleweeds” creator Tom Ryan. There, he learned the skills and discipline necessary to become a syndicated cartoonist. Studying the comics pages closely, he noticed there were a lot of successful strips about dogs, but none about cats! Combining his wry wit with the art skills he had honed since childhood, GARFIELD, a fat, lazy, lasagna-loving, cynical cat was born. Davis says Garfield is a composite of all the cats he remembered from his childhood, rolled into one feisty orange fur ball. Garfield was named after his grandfather, James Garfield Davis.
The strip debuted on June 19, 1978 in 41 U.S. newspapers. Several months after the launch, the Chicago Sun-Times cancelled GARFIELD. Over 1300 angry readers demanded that GARFIELD be reinstated. It was, and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, GARFIELD is read in over 2400 newspapers by 200 million people. Guinness World Records, named GARFIELD “The Most Widely Syndicated Comic Strip in the World.” Davis’s peers at the National Cartoonist Society honored him with Best Humor Strip (1981 and 1985), the Elzie Segar Award (1990), and the coveted Reuben Award (1990), the top award presented to a cartoonist by NCS members.
Garfield quickly became a sensation in the licensing world, too, inspiring Davis to establish his own company to take care of Garfield business concerns. Paws, Inc., founded in 1981, managed the worldwide rights for the famous fat cat, and Davis served as president of the Indiana-based business.
Garfield’s comic strip fame also spilled over to television and Davis penned eleven primetime specials for CBS. He received ten Emmy nominations and four Emmy Awards for Outstanding Animated Program. Movies were next, and Twentieth Century Fox turned out two feature films: Garfield: The Movie (‘04), and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (‘06). Davis also wrote the original screenplays and is executive producer for three animated features for DVD: Garfield Gets Real, Garfield’s Fun Fest, and Garfield’s Pet Force.
He has underwritten a number of environmental projects in his home state. Davis spearheaded reforestation, prairie and wetlands restorations, and built the world’s first all natural wastewater plant for commercial use. He was awarded the National Arbor Day Foundation’s Good Steward and Special Projects Award, and the Indiana Wildlife Federations’ Conservationist of the Year Award.
Davis was honored with a Doctor of Letters from Ball State University and a Doctor of Fine Arts from Purdue University. He was also awarded the Sagamore of the Wabash, the top honor an Indiana resident can receive from the Governor’s office.
