The Garfield Movie (2024)

The Garfield Movie arrives as a 2024 animated reboot of the lasagna-loving feline, a commercial success that critics greeted with the weary shrug reserved for adaptations that miss the point of their source. It is a film about a cat, and it knows it. The plot involves a heist, a long-lost father, and a corporate takeover of a dairy farm, but the stakes remain resolutely personal. This is not a vehicle for social messaging, and for that we may be grateful.

The few progressive markers that register do so faintly. A subplot at Lactose Farms finds a corporation displacing Otto the bull and separating him from his partner Ethel, a mild anti-corporate gesture that resolves into a milk-truck chase rather than a manifesto. The voice cast includes several actors of color, but since the characters are anthropomorphic animals, this representation is invisible and thematically inert. The film's moral about family and forgiveness is delivered with a light touch, never ascending to a lecture. On other fronts, the film is silent: no LGBTQ+ themes, no feminist critique, no racial consciousness, no climate crusade. Garfield's weight is played for humor, not body positivity. Neurodivergence and revisionist history are absent. The result is a children's entertainment that predates the cultural flashpoints of the 2020s, a relic of a simpler time when a cat could simply hate Mondays and eat.

We are left with a film that is neither a call to arms nor a battleground, but a 101-minute advertisement for lasagna and mild family reconciliation. It offers a faint corporate critique and a diverse but invisible cast, then retreats to the safety of a happy ending. The deadpan critic can only note the absence of ambition and the presence of a sequel in development.