Now in his 46^th year, Garfield has come a long way from his origins in the comic strip about a fat, lasagne-enjoying cat, with its clashing tones of consumerism and vaguely anti-capitalist sentiment (a dislike of Mondays, celebration of rest). There have been several iterations of the character in movie form, ever since the original Garfield: The Movie (2004), after which a sequel, A Tale of Two Kitties (2006) flopped onto the big screen. In 2009, Garfield’s Pet Force was released as a children’s show, which now only seems to be locatable on the streaming platform Tubi (the low-brow counterpart to MUBI). There was about a decade of respite from Garfield movies during the 2010s. But in May 2024, two decades after Garfield: The Movie, we have a reworked version, creatively named The Garfield Movie. 

The Garfield Movie opens with Garfield ordering food from an app that delivers via drone, and the plot resolves with a swarm of drones rescuing him from a freighthopping fight scene. The beginning and the end are what viewers remember—the developments in-between feel more like fluff. The cladding between the film’s two key events is a long-lost family narrative. Garfield’s idyllic life of leisure and gluttony is interrupted when he meets his father, Vic. Hitherto Garfield believed his father had abandoned him as a kitten in a dark alleyway—we learn via montage that this was the event that prompted him to be adopted by Jon Arbuckle, when Garfield scents a lasagne coming from a nearby restaurant and proceeds to clean them out of food under Jon’s enamoured gaze.

But Garfield’s father, it turns out, was entangled in a life of crime that prevented him from being in his child’s life, and will later embroil him in it, as Vic enlists Garfield in a quest to repay a debt to an old associate by breaking into a farmyard and hijacking a milk delivery. On the way there are several confusing side plots, including a medal-winning dairy cow who has been separated from her stud, and a villainous crime boss named Jinx. The story itself is a heartwarming redemption narrative that sees the father-and-son relationship between Garfield and Vic eventually restored after many trials and tribulations.

But amid all of these throwaway characters, we get the sense that the real protagonist of the film is its corporate sponsors. The Garfield Movie has been criticised for its heavy product placement. From start to finish, the movie is saturated in advertising, with a peculiar focus on drones. Of course, many films use drones for extradiegetic purposes, often landscape shots and panoramas. However, The Garfield Movie is a recent example where drones serve a key plot function without being positioned as a military or investigative device, such as in The Blair Witch Project (1999), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), or Eye in the Sky (2015). Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, given that at the outset The Garfield Movie is produced by Sony, a company that manufactures drones (and incidentally, the cameras attached to missiles used by military forces the world over). Still, it’s a little disconcerting in a children’s movie to see logos abound, including those of FedEx and Walmart. FedEx has contracts with Elroy Air, the same aircraft company as the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. The retail giant Walmart has a partnership with companies DroneUp and Flytrex for deliveries. 

Both DroneUp and Flytrex are software developers which operate using the ‘Halo’ surveillance network, a system which transfers real-time data through the Israeli company Elsight, largely developed through the mass monitoring of occupied Palestinian territories. The effects of this are far-reaching. In January 2024, the company unveiled a worldwide version of the Halo system. Across the globe, the same surveillance technology tested on civilian populations in Palestine is being used to integrate drones into several countries, including Australia. A month before the worldwide Halo launch in December 2023, Elsight announced a new partnership with Australian company Sphere Drones. Almost a year later, in September of 2024, Sphere entered a government contract with the Western Australia Police Force for operational use in their First Responder program in remote WA. 

Disturbingly, Elsight’s Halo system is projected to expand further into Australia, from remote mine sites to taxicab ranks, as soon as the mid-2030s. Drones are already increasing police powers across the continent at an alarming rate. They are currently used to prosecute teens doing burnouts in southern Tasmania. Here, police have also used drones for overhead searches, and in one case captured incidental footage of marijuana plants next to a residence. Despite being without a search warrant, the drone capture resulted in a Supreme Court trial against a disabled man for growing pot in his backyard. With this case in point, it seems all the more absurd that renowned stoner Snoop Dogg would agree to voice a character in such pro-drone copaganda as The Garfield Movie.

Nostalgia culture has a lot to answer for, apparently. Unlike its predecessors, The Garfield Movie seems specifically geared towards consent manufacture for drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Dipping a toe into drone terminology results in a deep dive into alphabet soup: drone fleets are described as remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), while vertical take off and land (VTOL) describes drones that look like miniature rockets; beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) refers to drone camera capture across an area so large that it is no longer visible to the pilot, and energy transfer and artificial noise (ETAN) means the drone sources energy from a remote beacon.

Most drones are often referred to as UAVs or quadcopters, which are described somewhat diminutively as ‘small’ drones despite their capacity to injure and even kill. Quadcopters are the same category of drone that features in The Garfield Movie and are used by the Berlin-based company Delivery Hero to deliver takeout. It is a strange rift that such an item could be carrying a pizza, a camera, or a missile in any given part of the world—a rift that the film industry, conglomerates with drone start-ups, and Big Tech sponsorships seem determined to close.

The Garfield Movie arrives in a year when drone use in warfare and worldwide deregulation of UAVs is at a peak. Drones have been deployed as a form of psychological terror in occupied Palestine as far back as the period from December 27, 2008 to 18 January, 2009, when unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) killed dozens of civilians during a period of military onslaught when Israel had banned media access to Gaza. During this time, according to Human Rights Watch, “Israeli and Palestinian human rights organisations—B’Tselem, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights—together reported 42 drone attacks that killed 87 civilians.” The organisation notes that the use of drones is rapidly expanding in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza and the Russian war on Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the same war-zone technology is shoehorned into consumer culture. Drones are widely positioned as being (a) convenient or (b) lifesaving, and silly as it is, this is very much the case in The Garfield Movie, where they are both of these things. At the movie’s climax, swarms of winking delivery drones arrive on the scene, allowing Garfield to fight off Jinx’s thugs, Roland and Nolan, using meatballs and Caesar salad dressing as ammo. The theme music from Top Gun (1986) plays as Garfield declares he does his own stunts, “Just like Tom Cruise.” This needle drop signals another movie franchise directly assisted by the U.S. military. “The original 1986 Top Gun, which was intimately guided by the Navy, has long represented the military’s capabilities when it comes to steering pop culture,” writes Roger Stahl for the Los Angeles Times.

The UAV technology currently expanding into regional Australia is the same as is used to police strict border regimes the world over, and has been developed through warfare against Palestine. “Israeli drones are essentially ones that have been tested over Gaza for many years,” writes Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (2023). Loewenstein also notes that in 2020 the European Union paid contracts for €100 million with arms manufacturers Israel Aerospace Industries and Elbit Systems in order for drones to replace patrol ships in the Mediterranean Sea. “The legal obligation to aid a vessel in distress does not apply to an unmanned aerial vehicle,” writes Phil McDuff for The Guardian. “We watch people drown from unmanned drones, while the state punishes those who try to save them.” As of September 2024, the Italian government is drafting laws that would impose fines of up to €10,000 (around $16,300 AUD) on pilots of aircraft that search for migrant boats in distress at sea, such as those used by charities like Médecins Sans Frontières.

The push of drone PR through films like The Garfield Movie comes at the same time as drones are being deregulated. In 2016, the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority removed the need to apply for a waiver through the authority in order to do business using drones. They are marketed in children’s movies as a convenience, while for other children the sound of a drone represents an imminent threat. In an episode of The Palestine Laboratory podcast, journalist Mariam Dawwas tells Loewenstein how children in Gaza can sometimes work out what weapons are being used in the Palestinian territory by the sound that they make. “People in Gaza know when it’s Apache. They know when it’s F-16. They know when it’s […] a drone. The drone it was becoming over the years, like a very normal thing of our daily lives.” We can only hope that it won’t remain so.

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Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn is a writer living in nipaluna/Hobart. Her recent work has appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Griffith Review, Island Magazine, and The Big Issue. She is currently working on a novel about music with the support of Arts Tasmania.