Famous for gracing the back windows of hatchbacks everywhere, Garfield started life as a comic strip by Jim Davis. 25 years after introducing the world to this lazy, lasagne-loving cat, director Peter Hewitt took it to the big screen, but the blend of CG imagery and live action resulted in a "cat-astrophic caper" that had critics and audiences turning up their noses. As the voice of the eponymous moggy, even Bill Murray choked up a fur ball after seeing it and effectively disowned the movie.

Cat Nap

If you're still reading this, Garfield is available to buy as a single or two-disc package, but there's little to recommend either option. Disc one contains a 16-minute reel of deleted scenes, most of which is taken up with bad dancing of both the live action and CG animated kind. Other than that, half-finished scenes featuring Garfield as a faceless orange blob is merely fodder for childhood nightmares.

Bringing The Cat To Life employs behind-the-scenes footage of a stagehand carrying a rubber ball around on a stick plus interviews with various effects bods to explain how Garfield was able to "seamlessly blend" with his environment. There's a good amount of technical information here, but there's no input from Hewitt or the cast on the challenges of working with aforementioned rubber ball.

Meanwhile Jim Davis does Rolf Harris in The Evolution Of Garfield, sketching out the cat as he talks about the process of finding the key features that embody the character. The multi-angle option means children can draw along with Jim as he prattles on, otherwise this is really quite dull.

Cat Fight

It's also a struggle to stay awake during Davis' and Hewitt's commentary - Hewitt in particular sounds as though he's drifting in and out of consciousness. "We're filming nothing here," he says, as Garfield comes into close-up and then goes back to sleep. Incidentally, this is the only place where the filmmakers actually acknowledge Bill Murray, but you can sense the bad feeling when Davis explains that he topped their list of "lazy, sardonic" actors, adding: "He epitomised every characteristic Garfield has." Miaow!

Also available as part of the single disc edition are two very clunky interactive games and the bonus cartoon Gone Nutty, which is quite a charming piece of animation actually. An Inside Look at Fox Animation's upcoming sci-fi tooner Robots is thrown in for good measure.

The two-disc edition includes four more behind-the-scenes featurettes, appealing to older moviegoers for whom Garfield forms a vital part of 80s nostalgia. Even so, The Birth Of Garfield is best described as The Life Of Jim Davis, giving the doodler a forum to waffle endlessly about his humble beginnings on a mid-Western farm, his battle with asthma, and his gradual (very gradual!) ascent to comic strip glory. Meanwhile, The Rise Of Garfield features an array of fat, lazy, hairy, obsessive Americans explaining why they feel such kinship with the feline hero. Gee, what could it be?

A technical commentary for key effects scenes along with a batch of multi-angle sequences (deconstructing the layers of CGI) and a film-to-storyboard comparison give a few useful insights into the production. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for From Script To Strip, a standard look at the making of the movie with, once again, absolutely no mention of Bill Murray whatsoever. In fact, it's Murray's absence that proves the major stumbling block for this DVD - the big, fat, invisible cat that nobody on the soundstage wants to acknowledge.

EXTRA FEATURES

DISC ONE

DISC TWO