Garfield
Short description
Garfield is a cat who has his world arranged exactly as he likes it: he eats, sleeps and rules the home of his owner Jon. That arrangement is disturbed when Jon, hoping to get closer to the veterinarian Liz, brings home a dog named Odie. Garfield regards the newcomer as a rival for Jon's attention and sets out to make life difficult for him. When Odie ends up in the hands of a television presenter with plans of his own for the animal, Garfield leaves his comfortable house and goes looking for the dog he had wanted gone.
The film is a mix of live action and computer animation directed by Peter Hewitt, whose earlier features include Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, Tom and Huck, The Borrowers and Thunderpants. Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow wrote the screenplay, and John Davis produced. Bill Murray provides the voice of Garfield, with Breckin Meyer as Jon, Jennifer Love Hewitt as Liz and Stephen Tobolowsky as the presenter Happy Chapman. The credited cast numbers 29.
Made for a budget of 50 million USD, the film took about 199 million USD worldwide, a return that outweighed its production cost several times over. Audience response was moderate: on IMDb it holds 5.1/10 from roughly 100,000 votes, and on TMDB 5.7/10 from a much smaller pool of about 4,300. A film critics' score of 3.8/10 from 133 reviews places professional opinion below even the lower of those audience figures, so the box office success was not matched by acclaim.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is based on the eponymous comic strip series by Jim Davis, which became very popular in the US, beginning in 1978 in the pages of the "Universal Press" agency newspapers and subsequently published in numerous books and television programs.
- Jim Davis appeared in the film in a small role as a drunken convention delegate.
- The film was originally scheduled for release on December 17, 2003, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the comic strip, but due to unfinished computer effects, the distributor postponed the premiere by another six months.
- Garfield the cat is a completely digital character, while the other animals had live "stand-ins" who were later replaced with computer-generated characters.
- Filming began on March 8, 2003, in Los Angeles. The film was also shot at the "Universal Studios" pavilions and, surprisingly, in the United Kingdom.
- Oleg Tabakov voiced the Russian dub of the cat Garfield.
- Jim Carrey auditioned for the role of John Arbuckle but was rejected.
- All the cars shown in the film inexplicably had the same license plate number – 135 749.
- In 1983, a computer game called “Garfield” was released in the USA. It was intended for “Atari 2600” computers, but was never commercially released. Currently, the game exists only as a rare prototype.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
