I for one would like to see an end to these live-action adaptations of retro cartoons, particularly wherein you get the main character played by some CGI creation. With films like
Garfield and
Scooby Doo, they were clearly aiming to make the titular characters look cartoony enough in their computer-generated guises so as to sufficiently resemble their original animated selves, yet also add "realistic" details like fur and irises to help them blend in a little more aptly into their new three-demensional environs. Problem is, they came up woefully short on both sides of the spectrum. Neither character looked enough like their cartoon counterparts for me to accept them as such, and yet they looked so fake and cartoony that the interactions going on between themselves and the rest of the live-action world seemed terribly ungainly. The decision to render Garfield in CGI whilst having the rest of the local menagerie portrayed by real animals, though obviously a lot more cost effective, worked out rather dismally in practice - having him neck-to-neck with flesh-and-blood felines only accentuated just how artificial the leading kitty was (as if it wasn't blatant enough already). It wasn't helped by the fact that NONE of the real animals they'd chosen looked anything like the characters as they appeared in the strip/cartoon. Couldn't they even have found an actual silver tabby to play Nermal? Not that "Nermal" as we saw him in the film had anything in common with the Nermal we know, other than actually being a cat.
The rather frustrating thing about the
Garfield movie was that it
wasn't--actually--that--bad. It was perfectly passable, if very bland and undemanding, family entertainment (at least when compared to the
Scooby Doo movie, which I personally found just plain painful to watch - sorry, Cass), and had it been about some different, original cat character I might have been a little better disposed toward it. Trouble is that it wasn't
Garfield. The characters, particularly Jon and Liz, were just so vexingly washed out. Stocking the soundtrack with such flavour-of-the-month groups as the Black-Eyed-Peas (as opposed to Lou Rawls or Desiree Goyette, who had been the staples in the animated series) kind of betrayed the sad probability that this film had been churned out not for the sake of providing pleasant nostalgia for life-long
Garfield fans like myself, but rather to make the character and franchise more marketable to the current generation of kids. Which actually kind of hurts.
I've heard whisper of this live action
Wacky Races adaptation they're currently trying to get off the ground - no doubt, if it goes ahead, Muttley and Saw-Tooth would also be portrayed by ugly masses of digital pixels. Warner Brothers, if you're listening, kindly can this idea before it's too late. You know it makes sense to do so.