Few things define Garfield. The grouchy yet likable pop-cultural fixture is defined by his ill temperament, cynicism, sedentary lifestyle, self-interest, and indifference to owner Jon Arbuckle.
As long as Garfield-ness is based on the feline personality type humans place onto cats, he may as well be a dog, an unnatural oxymoron with nothing to separate him from the pack.
The Garfield Movie ignored this ontological lesson when following Jim Davis's blueprint.
The new, animated version of the newspaper comic-strip fixture makes him trendy and marketable.
Garfield has softened his tougher edges, including relaxing his anti-Odie stance, by giving some of his emotion models larger eyes and a smaller mouth to make them cuter.
Fair enough, director Mark Dindal and the writing team of Paul Kaplan, Mark Torgove, and David Reynolds
had to change something because the original material's “lazy a-hole cat mostly just sits around” didn't fit cinema's narrative objectives