It has been two years since Alcon Entertainment announced that they would be making a fully CG-animated Garfield film. While there had not been much information about the project in the interim, to everyone's surprise, the company, on Monday (a day which Garfield hates), announced that Mark Dindal will direct the film. 

Dindal, who has previously helmed The Emperor's New Groove and Chicken Little, will work with a script written by Paul Kaplan and Mark Torgrove. The film's pre-production is set to begin next month. 

Garfield, which debuted in a comic strip in 1978, is about the interactions between the lazy cynical cat, Garfield, his owner, Jon Arbuckle, and fellow pet, Odie, the dog. It is to be noted that the character already made his big screen debut in the 2004 live feature, Garfield: The Movie, which had Bill Murray voicing the lasagna-loving cat.