MEXICO CITY (AP) — It’s been 46 years since the first Garfield comic strip was published in the United States and the character created by Jim Davis is ready to be introduced to a whole new generation with the animated film “The Garfield Movie.” (“Garfield: Out of Home”), in which the origins of this feline will be known before living with John Bonachon and Odie, in addition to following him on an adventure with a lot of adrenaline.
In Spanish for Latin America, Garfield is played by actor Guillermo “Memo” Villegas, known for his roles in series and films such as “Harina”, “Surviving Mis XV” and “School for Seductors”. Villegas debuts as a voice actor with this film, released on April 30 to coincide with Children’s Day in Mexico, and took over the voice of Garfield from Mexican actor Sandro Larenas, who played this gluttonous kitten for decades.
“At first I received it with a lot of emotion and pressure, the truth is that I did have pressure of ‘I’m not going to match what Sandro did’ and then I evolved to the idea of ’I don’t have to match anything’; He is a new character and there I started to enjoy him a lot,” said Villegas in an interview in the Mexican capital.
The actor grew up watching the Garfield cartoon on television, which is why he described him as a “character that I admire and respect.”
Larenas did not completely say goodbye to Garfield because in the film directed by Mark Dindal and written by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove and David Reynolds, he plays his father, Vic, a stray cat who has not seen Garfield in years. Until he reappears in his life and asks for help to pay off a very serious debt.
Vic owes a liter of milk for every day that the cat Jinx (Regina Orozco) spent captive after being discovered in a robbery she was doing with him. To make sure they keep her deal, Jinx has them threatened and watched by her henchmen Roland and Nolan, scary-looking dogs.
“They abandoned her and put her in jail, where everything stunk a lot, how little… They didn’t help her, it was done that way,” Orozco explained about Jinx, who, in addition to wearing turquoise jewelry, likes to drink milk from a glass. “But then, seeing that she can get revenge and that revenge is working, she starts to be a little more addicted to evil and she wants more and more and more.”
Roland and Nolan are played by comedians Jose Luis Slobotzky and Ricardo Pérez, respectively, from the popular podcast La Cotorrisa. They also grew up watching Garfield on television and it was their first voice-over experience.
“There we were, as each other’s couple, waiting for the other to finish,” Slobotzky said.
“Very good, my love!” Pérez recalled saying jokingly.
“With more intention, baby!” Slobotzky said.
“We went to the call together, I had to see when he was recording and he had to see when I was recording mine,” said Pérez.
According to Pérez, Roland and Nolan are “noble characters,” but Jinx sees the potential to make them intimidating. “The things they do are because they love Jinx and because they want to help her,” he noted.
One of the most marked changes in “The Garfield Movie” compared to the 2004 film and the animated series “Garfield and Friends” (“Garfield and his friends”) and The Garfield Show (“The Garfield Show”), transmitted from the late 1980s to the 2010s, is that in the new film there are applications to translate meows into Spanish, home delivery orders from the cell phone and a lot of technology on the farm where they plan to steal the milk. Until they come across a lovesick bull named Otto, played by the famous Mexican actor Joaquín Cosio.
Additionally, with the arrival of Vic, much more is known about Garfield’s origins.
“A lot of action, from there it is a very different thing from what we are used to from Garfield: drones, flying pizzas, explosions and stimulus after stimulus visually,” said Villegas.
“And we know the story of Garfield as a vulnerable kitten, a kitten with a desire to grow and a little bit to be loving,” added Orozco, who pointed out that in a future installment he would like there to be more female characters.
