Hacker Cinema
Garfield
2004 · Film · 80 min
Directed by Peter Hewitt
Garfield, the fat, lazy, lasagna lover, has everything a cat could want. But when Jon, in an effort to impress the Liz - the vet and an old high-school crush - adopts a dog named Odie and brings him home, Garfield gets the one thing he doesn't want. Competition.
1 negative5 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
I don't think this came about by randomly deciding to take a character out of a strip. The creators of G-G recognized that Jon is a depressing character who has these one way discussions with Garfield. Garfield's inner monologue (that Jon is not aware of) provides all the humor, mostly at Jon's expense. Take the humor out of the comic, and you're left with the depression. It goes straight from a comedy to a tragedy.
This is what's interesting about G-G. The tragedy was always there. We kinda knew the tragedy was always there, but we'd rather laugh at Jon with Garfield than commiserate with Jon.
Taking superheroes out of a random movie would lead to silliness, yes, but nothing poignant.
>I really fail to see what they are trying to do with this. That game has hardly any "story" behind it
That hardly troubled tons of other movies that did the same, from Garfield (comic strip, not much of a plot), Prince of Persia (prince saves princess for evil guy, that sums it), to the Lego movie, etc. They can always write a plot involving pigs and birds fighting.
Plus, there's the existing Angry Birds cartoon series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angry_Birds_Toons
>and the characters are not really that interesting.
They are funny looking enough to sell hundreds of millions of merchandize with them on. And the interesting story wont be in the game, it will be in the movie (if they succeed).
The benefits though are obvious: if they succeed with the movie, they can tap into kids minds like Mickey Mouse, not just like some forgotten in 5 years game fad.
Joel Cohen (Garfield) is different Joel Coen.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0169505/
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001054/
Err, that's him being funny. No one at his level just has chats on the phone and has contracts written up and walks into a studio to do lines.
He saw a paycheck and took it. Come on, a brooding Garfield movie by the Coen brothers?
He thought that was a Coen Brothers movie: http://www.vulture.com/2010/07/bill_murray_only_did_garfield.html
I worked on the Garfield movies - live action with CG cats - and frames with Garfield in it required between 600-900 render hours. This is due to the physically based animation support for internal body motions and similar physics for all the fur. I've still got the render stats, because I was the render farm wrangler for those jobs...