This, the first in a steady line of entertaining Garfield specials, came about before the flabby tabby had completely found his footing in the character design department, so if the animation standard occasionally dips into crude or off-model waters (goodness was Odie's neck really ever that spindly?), there's your answer. Slightly more vexing is a minor plot-hole that occurs around the final third simply to move things to a tear-jerking climax in which Garfield is forced to re-examine a few of his attitudes (exactly how long does an animal have to be in this particular pound before the possibility of being 'removed' starts looming over them? Odie hasn't even been there for a day, and already the other animals are predicting that he'll be next to go.). As wickedly superior as Garfield's scripting tends to be in comparison to a lot of your typical animated family fare, there are a small number of details which you'd be better off not thinking too diligently about in this one. Sit back instead and enjoy it for what it is: a simple, breezy and surprisingly touching little escapade, one which ranks as a sure-fire classic in the field of comic-strip TV spin-offs. Here, Garfield finds it in his lethargic paws to rescue Odie from ill-kismet in the local pound, having landed him in there after a series of pranks on the disgruntled old man next door.
With hindsight, I have to laugh at just how much this basic 24-minute cartoon managed to get my heart racing when I rented the video as a considerably younger viewer. Back then, the notion that Garfield might choose not to save Odie at all (as he considers for a brief while) just horrified me, not to mention the heartbreaking scene where the two of them spend what could well be their last few moments together. Really, the story is as safe and foreseeable as the next piece of family viewing, and when I recently got my hands on the DVD and gave it a re-visit, I wasn't too surprised that it had lost the power to have me dangling on the edge of my seat. What it still refused to give up doing, however, was to move me just as much as it did before. In its perfectly contented simplicity, 'Here Comes Garfield' goes for the most tried and trusted way of giving the human heart-strings a good tugging matching a lachrymose tune with an ingenuous flash-back at just the right moment and succeeds hands down. Sure, I'm fully aware that I'm a total softie, and it doesn't take much to have me snivelling, but really, if you're not in the slightest bit moved by the sequence in question, you'd have to be at least three times more cynical than Garfield himself, the King of Sardonic (and even he gets dewy-eyed at one point in this special).
On the lighter side, 'Here Comes Garfield' is also packed with many an amusing moment, continuing the tradition laid out by 'Lady and the Tramp' to have impounded animals spouting prison clichés (and each one of them has an amusing story to tell about how they came to be in the pound me, I like Rocky's myself). Top it all off with Lorenzo Music's magnificent voice-work, in what would later immortalise him as our leading cat's vocals, and the usual selection of catchy easy-listening tunes, and you have compulsory viewing for every Garfield fan. A bit simplistic, perhaps, but then we all need a bit of light-hearted entertainment every now and then to keep those inner kids of ours happy.
Grade: A-
