It may seem pretty pointless to criticize the integrity of The Garfield Movie considering that it’s arguably just colorful garbage engineered to distract children for 100 minutes. But upon closer inspection, there seems to be something seriously wrong with this film.
Making Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties look like a brave, uncompromising work of art by comparison, The Garfield Movie is basically one giant commercial. It’s chock-full of product placements for companies such as Walmart, Popchips and The Olive Garden — though, becoming known as the de facto Italian restaurant for flea-ridden pets may not quite be the promotional endgame they were hoping for.
This is probably to be expected in an animated children’s movie these days, especially considering that the Garfield character has always been a boon to late capitalism. But what is surprising about this movie is just how many drones are in it. Like, a genuinely staggering number of drones.
The movie literally opens with Garfield placing a drone delivery order for Italian food (it arrives seconds later), and as the credits roll, we get another drone delivery, this one provided by FedEx. If that wasn’t enough, the climax (spoiler alert for the Garfield movie) finds Garfield defeating the bad guys using a whole fleet of pizza delivery drones.
Sony
It sure appears as if the movie is relentlessly trying to push the idea that drone deliveries are super convenient and that the drones providing this service are really our friends. Which is objectively weird.
This plot point comes at a time when delivery drones are being increasingly rolled out due to newly loosened FAA regulations. And while there are promising possibilities for delivery drones (like supplying medication to remote areas), so far companies seem most interested in using them to send greasy bags of fast food whizzing through the sky. Or to deliver packages, possibly as an excuse to spy on you.
But for some reason, this controversial technology is a major component of The Garfield Movie, even though the character has existed for over four decades and drones never came up a single time until now.
We’re not saying that this storyline was thrown together purely to normalize excessive drone use in the impressionable minds of its young audience, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that The Garfield Movie was produced by Sony, a company that also happens to be in the drone manufacturing business.
Sony making a movie in which their products end up saving the day wouldn’t be without precedent, either, lest we forget the time that the Ghostbusters used psychic slime powered by the Sony Walkman to animate the Statue of Liberty. That’s right, if it hadn’t been for the Walkman, humanity would have been enslaved by an evil painting.
But in this case, the technology in question is the matter of some debate at the moment. It really does feel like Garfield is being used as a corporate psyop to make sure that younger generations will be cool with the omnipresence of flying pizza robots, even if their parents aren’t.
That said, maybe some good can come of this if Garfield’s distaste for Mondays helps to normalize the four-day workweek.
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