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Garfield: The Movie brings to life the popular comic strip by cartoonist Jim Davis. The animated version of Garfield the cat is voiced by Bill Murray. Breckin Meyer plays Garfield's owner Jon Arbuckle and Jennifer Love Hewitt plays his love interest, Dr. Liz. Odie the dog is played by a dog. Other voices featured in the movie include Debra Messing, Jimmy Kimmel and Alan Cumming. Garfield is directed by Peter Hewitt and written by Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow.

Without getting into too much detail, the story focuses on Garfield's attempts to save Odie from the grasp of a self-centred TV pet show host called Happy Chapman (Stephen Tobolowsky). Chapman has kidnapped Odie and is taking him on a train to New York to pursue a lucrative career as a pet show host. Garfield feels somewhat responsible for Odie's disappearance as it is his fault Odie ran away from home. He was feeling neglected by Jon after Jon adopted Odie and started paying much more attention to the puppy instead of his overweight cat. Garfield proceeds to lock Odie out of the house and the result of this was the predicament involving Happy Chapman. So Garfield sets out to prove to Jon that he is much more than a fat, greedy, wise-cracking, lasagna-loving pussycat.

Garfield: The Movie is now available on DVD. The DVD is very thin on the extras, as it only includes a commentary by director Peter Hewitt and producer John Davis, two short featurettes on some upcoming 20th Century Fox movies and a music video for the song "Holla!" which appears in the movie. The song is performed by the Baha Men.

Although Garfield: The Movie may not entirely be my cup of tea, I watched it with my young niece and she loved it and if the kids love it, is there anything else that really matters? (As a side note, I did ask her what she liked about the movie and she said Garfield liked lasagna and she liked lasagna and that is why she liked the movie so take that for what it's worth.) I have to admit there were a couple of scenes in the movie where I chuckled - the scene with Garfield and Odie dancing comes to mind. But overall, it is a pretty basic story with a few cute moments. It is a good movie to slap in the old DVD player for the kids on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I would think only kids, extreme Garfield fans, animal lovers or stalkers of Jennifer Love Hewitt would appreciate this movie.

The only part of the movie that I would question from a kids standpoint was at the end of movie where Jon punches out Chapman. I don't know what kind of message that would send to the kiddies, but other than that, I thought it was a good clean, humorous movie for the young ones. And for all the fathers out there who must watch it with their kids, Jennifer looks great in the movie and wears some rather provocative clothing so thumbs up for that.

The animation in the movie (Garfield) is decent as I thought the movie did a good job of integrating the CGI Garfield with the real life human beings and animals. The dog who played Odie was probably the best actor in the movie although all the actors and actresses seemed to do a good job with their less-than-demanding roles. Perhaps Jon Arbuckle could have been better cast. I didn't find Breckin Meyer did a good job of portraying the clumsy owner that I remember from the comic strips. But that might be just getting a bit too picky.

Like I said, if this movie is good enough for the kids, then it is good enough for me.