i just watched garfield gets real. then i had to watch it again. jim davis you coke fiend. where the fuck do i even begin with this thing? not once in my life have i seen such a cocksunk flick that just casually drops such an ungodly amount of qustions and proceeds to answer absolutely none of them, but garfield got real i guess and all shit broke loose. i dont have jack shit to say about this movies writing or the actual plot. its bad i guess? kind of crazy how jim davis started writing this thing in 1996 and released it in 2007 making this film an 11 year journey which didnt manage to make me unironically crack a smile even once. heres a suggestion big guy, maybe stick to your 3 panels about italian food. the plot is whatever. garfield goes into the real world or something, it doesnt really matter. what im here to talk about are the logistics of the world of garfield gets real and trying to decipher the exact mechanics of how any of this inane bullshit works. most of the time when people get bent out of shape over obvious cartoon logic its pretty dumb low hanging fruit because yeah no shit buggs bunny couldnt walk on the air until he figures out that he should be falling. its a cartoon. garfield gets real is different though. this movie blatantly shows you the innerworkings of the univers but then just refuses to elaborate to the point where it straight up cant be ignored so im just gonna bite the bullet and walk you through it because your guess is as good as anyone elses. i guess we could ask the j-man himself but shit whatre the chances of the guy ever seeing my shitty email. ok fuck here i go
the movie starts with the sun rising over the town like it needs sunlight to exist before garfield wakes up on you guessed it, a monday, because we all know thats one of the most classic garfieldisms you could possibly start off with aside from him shoveling lasagna into his gullet. this is actually going to be really important but it also wont be at all. seems to just be another day in the arbuckle house if you can ignore jons revolting teeth or the worst looking ketchup a computer has ever had the misfortune of barely rendering.
im not really gonna complain about the overall concept of garfield knowing hes in a comic since thats the entire point of the movie what with him becoming real and all that noise. its ridiculous and stupid and weird but in the grand scheme of things just the tip of the iceberg. the concept of cartoon characters making a meta production of their own existence isnt anything new but you need to start asking questions once you see garfield greeting his friends on his work before rolling up to a motherfucking garfield themed studio. shouldnt this guy be a multimillionaire from royalties by now? hes clearly a celebrity. or would jon be? i never really thought to ask myself what garfields rights are but lets ask ourselves our first real question. theres a garfield studio, so why is he actually living in the house from the garfield comic strip outside of work. is it to stay in character if the comics are all fake? sure he literally is garfield but is there a reason he needs to live as garfield from the comic? there seems to be no difference except his professional life seems to just mirror his home life. if this is his job and he has free will shouldnt he be able to do whatever he wants outside of the comic? or maybe this is just the way he is? it hasnt even been 5 minutes yet. i think im going to cry. jim really outdid himself with this one
oh ok. so garfield is an actor. hes the star of his own comic strip about his life and people treat him like an actor but hes also still garfield and acts like garfield. so "garfield" isnt a fictional character or an independent being with free will. hes both. what the fuck. same shit applies to all of his friends and everyone who works in this building too? nobody is playing a character but they simultaneously are besides for the ones who actually do stuff like set up the stages and write the scripts and everyWHAT HELLO
ok, tsar-breasted personal assistant(?) aside, garfield starts lamenting his job making comic strips and saying that its the same few shit jokes every day and its kind of surreal to watch. garfield, the monday hating, alarm clock smashing, dog kicking, lasagna consuming cat, is voicing how tired he is of his own tired 4 joke schtick, and it makes you wonder. is this garfield speaking? or is this jim davis being vocal about the monotony and repetition that plagues his own intellectual property? tired of these characters being unable to change? unable to grow? unable to evolve? who cares i really dont.
now its time to talk about how the they actually make the comic strips. with sets and props and stuff. ok? so theyre taking videos. they also have scripts and need to memorize their lines for some reason even though every comic strip is only 3 panels and theyre not even shot in one take. then they take the videos and plug them into some weird machine that adds speech bubbles and turns the characters into stylized versions of themselves
i dont know. it seems weirdly limiting if you want to make a comic with more than 3 panels but practically everything in this reality feels like it was made up by a child pretending he made up a good set of rules for a card game that doesnt even exist. trust him though. you dont want the four of clubs.
when they finish the comic they put it in this big scanner thing and then put it into the real world. like they can take the comic they made and then use satellites or some shit and then beam it into the real world onto real newspapers. now how the fuck is this supposed to work? i can concede that cartoon characters have access to their own mystical cartoon technology but i guess they just have power over reality now. sure theyre just shooting comics into newspapers now but whos stopping them from just beaming a giant swastika and impact font text that says KIDDYS MAKE ME GIDDY onto your arms? does this technology only extend to ink? its also never explained whos writing these comics because it doesnt matter at all. maybe its jim. maybe hes god. oh, also all the characters can go to the stage and the dude in the control booth can use any comic as a window to view the real world. if youve ever jerked off in the same room as comic strip, theres a very real possibility that garfield and friends got a front row seat. nermal probably jacked off too
what the hell even
ok so garfield gets so fed up with the comic world that despite the fact that the control room guy says that once you go to the real world you cant go back. must say a lot about the monotony of comic world if they really dont have any substitute for the real world but i guess ive talked about that at length by now. he jumps in through some pressurized tear in the stage/reality and ends up in the real world which is shaded differently but everyone is exactly as cartoony as in the cartoon world and also looks bad. now garfields friends and family can now spectate garfield from newspapers but they can also spectate him from anywhere and see what hes up to because of the weird satellite technology i mentioned earlier. oh well at least they cant talk to each other because their realities are separated. <=== FORESHADOWING. then garfield meets some disgusting friends because hes a stray now and stray cats cant find food. also theres this wretched thing. its gross and i will kill it.
would you believe me if i told you what happens next makes any sense? because you shouldnt believe that. since garfield went into the real world, i guess they cant actually make garfield comics anymore and put them in the newspaper since the real garfield is missing, so the newspaper company holds a contest to replace garfields strip. ok? so lets think, is the implication here that if garfield gets chosen to be the star of his own comic strip again hes able to go back into the comic world? that really seems to be what hes trying to do, but do the humans have a process for sending garfield back to his world? does that explain how garfield originally ended up in the comic world? once someone wins the contest, do they get a house and everything in the comic world like garfield or do their backgrounds/setting become real in the comic world like garfields? are they able to leave like garfield went into the real world? what if the newspaper decided to start publishing a godzilla comic strip, would a wrathful king of monsters be able to leave the comic and start thrashing shit the fuck up in the real world? weve already established that its possible for a comic character to enter the real world, so does that mean that the humans created the comic world for the soul purpose of making comics? i guess so? right now im trying to wrap my head around the possibly symbiotic relationship between the newspaper company and the comic world. the comic characters are pretty aware that its their job to make comics and i guess they arent being paid for it, so are they just being forced to create comics for the rest of their conceivable eternity aka when the newspaper company decides to stop printing them? what does this mean for the characters themselves??? i guess it means that the comic characters werent actually born but they were made? which i thought was obvious, but does that mean that none of the characters backgrounds actually happened from the perspective of anyone living in the comic world? these characters were created by jim davis, but does that mean that theyve always existed the way they are until written otherwise? do their personalities change off-set if they start to be slowly written differently? also if garfield is given his own strip back, how does he know that this transports him back into the comic world, and is this how he got into the comic world to begin with? is he familiar with the process that turns physical beings like the competitors as well as fictional characters into comic characters? there are characters at the contest which are supposed to replace garfield, so are they like. signing a waver to go into the comic world? or are they just acting like the character thats going to get transported into the comic world with their creators help? at the end of the movie one of the stray cats makes it into the comic world and appears in a comic, but how could he have been written into a comic by a person if no people were complicit with its arrival into the comic world? so just how much power DOES the comic world have over the real world? are the humans just trusting them to make something they can publish? do they not care? it gets established later that there IS still a way back into the comic world, so do the humans know about that? of course garfield wanted to escape, his and all his friends existences center around endlessly creating 3 panel entertainment for human beings. the comics dont have any "real world" of their own. no lives outside their basic personalities thatve already been written, so they dont have as much free will as i thought? the humans creating the comic world synthetically WOULD also explain why garfield lives as garfield both in the comic and his reality because the comic creators want to keep them the same and engineer them to not have ambition. why would the contestants want to go the comic world then? are the creators of these characters writing the scripts, or do they just trust the comic characters inside the comic world to do it? do the humans have contact with the characters they create once theyre transported to the comic world? is there a cross-dimensional writing team? id assume that if the newspaper company did create the comic world dude then the humans would have some sort of idea as to how the comic world works and they could talk to the characters through the newspaper..? maybe? but the characters talk to each other as if its their own production theyre putting on with no help from the outside world. like its just their job to make the comics, but they obviously need some help with the outside world so like. god. who cares. this sucks.
i never even mentioned all the other characters like wally who play pivotal roles in the plot. why? because its stupid. i dont need to justify saying anything about this film that i havent already. the part of garfield gets real that really just doesnt sit right with me though is that it insists that you figure it out. it wants you, the viewer to fix everything wrong with what youre seeing, but you cant. its like a sword that was forged to be broken. you can try to make sense of it. you can try to make things work, but no matter how hard you try, it was doomed from the very beginning. it asks you to keep watching as if its going to give you any answers. it begs you stay in your seat, and promises closure. but jim davis doesnt know what closure is. closure to jim davis is a cat smoking a pipe on panel 3. half convinced that i could rip this dudes face off scooby doo style and david lynch would be sitting there telling me how tragic it is that i watched garfield gets real on a fucking cell phone. this is the "challenging art" all those teenagers told you about. huh. earlier on in this rant i kind of just casually mentioned that garfield goes into the real world. this is true. he does do this. thats why its called garfield gets real, but its really dawning on me now how cartoony the real world actually is. theres slapstick and shit. itd be really interesting if garfield actually had to make sense of reality but reality is a cartoon and. wait
oh my god.
i mightve cracked this shit wide open actually
the real world in garfield gets real isnt the real world at all. its another layer of the comic world. garfield never left.
the burning building at the end of the movie is an allegory for your brain.
NERMAL WAS JACKING OFF THE WHOLE TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
