Garfield (2017)

Lore & Background

By 2017, the Garfield brand had been a fixture in pop culture for nearly four decades. Jim Davis's strip, launched in 1978, built its mythology around a small Ohio household where a cat with a philosopher's cynicism and a food critic's palate held court over everyone else. The 1988 animated series expanded that world into serialized adventures, and the 2004 and 2006 live-action films (starring Brendan Fraser as Jon) proved the characters could carry a theatrical comedy. The 2017 animated entry picks up in that tradition, leaning into the visual language of modern CGI while preserving the strip's signature deadpan timing and physical comedy.

The film's world is deliberately cozy and small-scale: a suburban home, a park, a few neighborhood landmarks. This mirrors the comic's setting, where the entire universe is whatever Garfield can see from his windowsill. The humor still flows from the gap between Garfield's grandiose self-image and the reality that he is, at bottom, a cat who just wants his next meal and a long afternoon on the couch. Nermal remains the foil, Odie the comic relief, and Jon the unwitting straight man who keeps getting knocked over by the sheer gravitational pull of his cat's ego.

For fans who grew up reading the strip in newspaper Sunday pages or watching the Saturday-morning cartoon, the 2017 film is a familiar homecoming rendered in new technology. The jokes land the same way—a sarcastic one-liner, a slow blink, a dramatic sigh—because the characters' voices and rhythms are unchanged even as the animation style modernizes.

In Their Own Story

The kitchen light was the pale blue of 6 a.m., the one hour Garfield tolerated only because the refrigerator was three steps away. He lay on the linoleum, belly up, one paw draped over the edge of the counter as if he owned the building. Jon shuffled past in socks, coffee mug in hand, and Garfield's single visible eye tracked the movement with the precision of a radar dish.

"Odie," Garfield said, not lifting his head. "The dog. The one with the slobber. Tell him the treats are in the blue cabinet. The one with the picture of the—"

A wet, enthusiastic thud. A yip. The cabinet door swinging open with the full force of a golden retriever's enthusiasm. A cascade of treats hitting the floor in a small, crunchy avalanche.

Garfield opened both eyes. Closed them again. "...Acceptable."

Somewhere down the hall, Nermal's tiny, grating voice called, "Garfield! Garfield! Do you want to play? I brought a ball! It's pink!" The cat's left ear rotated backward like a satellite dish rejecting a signal. He rolled onto his back, paws in the air, and let out a sigh so long and theatrical it could have powered a small wind turbine. The sun crept another inch across the floor. The treats were still on the ground. He had, he decided, all the time in the world.

Reader's Guide

The 2017 animated film marked a deliberate shift in how the Garfield brand approached the big screen. After the live-action era of the mid-2000s, the decision to return to full animation signaled a desire to reconnect with the visual roots of the comic strip and the classic Saturday-morning series. For long-time readers, this meant the characters could once again move with the exaggerated, rubbery physics that made Garfield's lazy flops and Odie's boundless energy so visually funny on the page.

Production centered on capturing the strip's timing and tone in a feature-length structure. The challenge was always the same: Garfield's humor is built on stillness, on the pause before the quip, on the slow blink that says more than any dialogue. Animators and writers worked to preserve those beats so the film didn't become a generic cartoon but felt like a Sunday-page strip stretched across a theater screen.

The cast of voices and the writing team aimed to keep Jon's exasperation, Odie's goofy energy, and Nermal's insufferable cheerfulness in the same register fans recognized from decades of the strip. The result is a film that reads less like a new story and more like a beloved neighbor inviting you over for lasagna—familiar, warm, and just a little bit sarcastic about the whole experience.

Did You Know?

• Jim Davis created Garfield in 1978, and the character's signature hatred of Mondays became one of the most recognizable running gags in comic-strip history.
• The 2004 live-action Garfield film and its 2006 sequel starred Brendan Fraser as Jon Arbuckle, bringing the comic's deadpan humor to a live-action theatrical format for the first time.
• Garfield's love of lasagna is so central to the character that it functions almost as a personality trait in its own right, referenced in virtually every adaptation from the strip onward.
• The character of Nermal, the perpetually cheerful kitten, was designed specifically as Garfield's foil and has been a source of comedic tension in the franchise since his introduction in the strip.