It might appear fairly pointless to criticize the integrity of The Garfield Film contemplating that it’s arguably simply colourful rubbish engineered to distract youngsters for 100 minutes. However upon nearer inspection, there appears to be one thing critically unsuitable with this movie.
Making Garfield: A Story of Two Kitties appear to be a courageous, uncompromising murals by comparability, The Garfield Film is mainly one large industrial. It’s chock-full of product placements for firms reminiscent of Walmart, Popchips and The Olive Backyard — although, turning into often known as the de facto Italian restaurant for flea-ridden pets could not fairly be the promotional endgame they had been hoping for.
That is in all probability to be anticipated in an animated youngsters’s film lately, particularly contemplating that the Garfield character has all the time been a boon to late capitalism. However what is stunning about this film is simply what number of drones are in it. Like, a genuinely staggering variety of drones.
The film actually opens with Garfield putting a drone supply order for Italian meals (it arrives seconds later), and because the credit roll, we get one other drone supply, this one supplied by FedEx. If that wasn’t sufficient, the climax (spoiler alert for the Garfield film) finds Garfield defeating the dangerous guys utilizing an entire fleet of pizza supply drones.
Sony
It certain seems as if the film is relentlessly making an attempt to push the concept that drone deliveries are tremendous handy and that the drones offering this service are actually our buddies. Which is objectively bizarre.
This plot level comes at a time when supply drones are being more and more rolled out attributable to newly loosened FAA laws. And whereas there are promising prospects for supply drones (like supplying remedy to distant areas), up to now firms appear most fascinated with utilizing them to ship greasy baggage of quick meals whizzing via the sky. Or to ship packages, probably as an excuse to spy on you.
However for some motive, this controversial expertise is a serious element of The Garfield Film, regardless that the character has existed for over 4 many years and drones by no means got here up a single time till now.
We’re not saying that this storyline was thrown collectively purely to normalize extreme drone use within the impressionable minds of its younger viewers, however we’d be remiss if we didn’t level out that The Garfield Film was produced by Sony, an organization that additionally occurs to be within the drone manufacturing enterprise.
Sony making a film during which their merchandise find yourself saving the day wouldn’t be with out precedent, both, lest we overlook the time that the Ghostbusters used psychic slime powered by the Sony Walkman to animate the Statue of Liberty. That’s proper, if it hadn’t been for the Walkman, humanity would have been enslaved by an evil portray.
However on this case, the expertise in query is the matter of some debate in the mean time. It actually does really feel like Garfield is getting used as a company psyop to ensure that youthful generations can be cool with the omnipresence of flying pizza robots, even when their dad and mom aren’t.
That mentioned, possibly some good can come of this if Garfield’s distaste for Mondays helps to normalize the four-day workweek.
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