Garfield’s Fun Fest (2008)

Garfield’s Fun Fest (2008)

Directed by: Mark A.Z. Dippé, Eondeok Han

Starring: Frank Welker, Tim Conway, Gregg Berger

You know, sometimes I need a break from 60’s horror movies and need something a little newer. And sometimes, I’ll watch a terrible Garfield CGI movie and wish I’d never been born, then crawl into the corner and cry, sobbing as I yell, “WHY?!” over and over again. Sometimes.

Garfield’s Fun Fest is a sequel of sorts to Garfield Gets Real, another awful CGI movie about a lazy cat. This time they downplayed the difference between their “newspaper world” and the “real world,” which… is just something I don’t want to think about any more than necessary. Instead, all the off-brand comic strip characters are having a talent show! Hooray! Only, Garfield doesn’t feel funny anymore, so he and Odie journey to a magical fairybook land where he drinks some “funny water” after being trained in being funny by a frog. But it turns out… the funny wasn’t in the water after all, it was in Garfield all along! And then Nermal is in a robot or something. The end.

According to IMDb, Jim Davis was actually the only writer for this movie, which makes SO MUCH SENSE! Yes, he acknowledges that Garfield isn’t funny, but on his “journey of rediscovery,” there’s a bunch of lame dime-store lessons on what is and what isn’t funny, and it all seems like somebody read a chapter in a freshman psychology textbook on humor and thought that they were really fucking clever all of a sudden. Which fits with Jim Davis perfectly! This movie is finally proof that no, he has no idea what is or isn’t funny. That, if nothing else, made this movie worthwhile.