1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 97: Casper
… “the first feature film to have a fully computer-generated … character in a leading role,” according to the IMDb.
Indeed, when ghostly young Casper is granted a few hours of re-embodiment, his human portrayer is less winsome than the computer-generated spirit. This is less a mark of human failure than of technical virtuosity.
Along with Casper, there are three other principal ghosts: “Fatso,” “Stretch,” and “Stinkie,” Casper’s loutish uncles. Physically, they’re overgrown soap bubbles. They’re corporeal, but just barely. You can see them – and see through them. If you touch them, they dissipate. (No harm is done; they easily re-form.) Fat or thin, they’re rounded: there’s little angularity, and no severity, in their faces.
The uncles are malicious but jovial. Casper himself would be cuddly were he more than minimally solid. Such is his plight: he can love, but he can’t be embraced by his beloved.
The movie is a child-friendly version of the classic story of a romantic encounter between a human and a god (an angel, a sprite, a space alien, etc.). The themes are inaccessibility and yearning.
The girl is played by 1990s “child scare-queen” Christina Ricci (The Addams Family; Sleepy Hollow). Casper sees her and falls in love. (That’s also how I felt about her in the mid-nineties.) Ricci is Kat, the daughter of Dr. Harvey (Bill Pullman), a psychologist who specializes in therapy for the dead – or, as he calls them, the “living impaired.” He explains that ghosts are people who fail to fully “cross over” because of “unresolved issues.” Dr. Harvey has an unresolved issue of his own, which is that his wife’s death has left him griefstricken and dialed up his eccentricity to eleven. He drags Kat across the country so that he can talk to ghosts and track down his wife’s spirit.
Dr. Harvey and Kat end up in Maine, in the run-down, Gothic dwelling of Casper and his uncles, at the behest of treasure-hunters played by Eric Idle (Monty Python) and Cathy Moriarty (most famous as Robert De Niro’s chilly wife in Raging Bull). Idle and Moriarty are involved in the movie’s funniest scenes, some of which also benefit from cameos by Saturday Night Live icons – a conceit repeated by director Brad Silberling in his Land of the Lost (2009).
For example:
The uncles like to frighten people. Casper tries to befriend people. The effect is the same: the living flee in terror. Until the Harveys arrive, that is. They weather the initial storm. Soon, Casper is cooking Kat’s breakfast, and the uncles are taking a shine to the Doctor – so much so, in fact, that they plot for him to die so that he can join their posse.
Kat, meanwhile, is grateful for Casper’s attention, although she’d rather be with the local flesh-and-blood heart-throb (cue Carrie references). Will Casper win her over? In the spirit of Ray Bradbury, yes and no. Carefully attend to Casper’s re-embodiment scene. It becomes clear that Kat would accept him only under conditions that he couldn’t permanently satisfy; and, perhaps, rightly so. The movie is bittersweet.
It also has more swearing and gross-out humor than your average children’s movie. (Again, see Silberling’s Land of the Lost, which, wisely, targets an older audience.) Casper’s plight might be at the movie’s center, but the tone is set by those hedonistic vulgarians, the uncles. Which is just as well: the core is perhaps too sad.
I liked the set design best of all. The run-down mansion is exquisite. There are lots of visual references to old movies – to Oz, especially. Afterward, I wanted to watch Casper again, to see how many references I could count; Land of the Lost, too.
Indeed, when ghostly young Casper is granted a few hours of re-embodiment, his human portrayer is less winsome than the computer-generated spirit. This is less a mark of human failure than of technical virtuosity.
Along with Casper, there are three other principal ghosts: “Fatso,” “Stretch,” and “Stinkie,” Casper’s loutish uncles. Physically, they’re overgrown soap bubbles. They’re corporeal, but just barely. You can see them – and see through them. If you touch them, they dissipate. (No harm is done; they easily re-form.) Fat or thin, they’re rounded: there’s little angularity, and no severity, in their faces.
The uncles are malicious but jovial. Casper himself would be cuddly were he more than minimally solid. Such is his plight: he can love, but he can’t be embraced by his beloved.
The movie is a child-friendly version of the classic story of a romantic encounter between a human and a god (an angel, a sprite, a space alien, etc.). The themes are inaccessibility and yearning.
The girl is played by 1990s “child scare-queen” Christina Ricci (The Addams Family; Sleepy Hollow). Casper sees her and falls in love. (That’s also how I felt about her in the mid-nineties.) Ricci is Kat, the daughter of Dr. Harvey (Bill Pullman), a psychologist who specializes in therapy for the dead – or, as he calls them, the “living impaired.” He explains that ghosts are people who fail to fully “cross over” because of “unresolved issues.” Dr. Harvey has an unresolved issue of his own, which is that his wife’s death has left him griefstricken and dialed up his eccentricity to eleven. He drags Kat across the country so that he can talk to ghosts and track down his wife’s spirit.
Dr. Harvey and Kat end up in Maine, in the run-down, Gothic dwelling of Casper and his uncles, at the behest of treasure-hunters played by Eric Idle (Monty Python) and Cathy Moriarty (most famous as Robert De Niro’s chilly wife in Raging Bull). Idle and Moriarty are involved in the movie’s funniest scenes, some of which also benefit from cameos by Saturday Night Live icons – a conceit repeated by director Brad Silberling in his Land of the Lost (2009).
For example:
The uncles like to frighten people. Casper tries to befriend people. The effect is the same: the living flee in terror. Until the Harveys arrive, that is. They weather the initial storm. Soon, Casper is cooking Kat’s breakfast, and the uncles are taking a shine to the Doctor – so much so, in fact, that they plot for him to die so that he can join their posse.
Kat, meanwhile, is grateful for Casper’s attention, although she’d rather be with the local flesh-and-blood heart-throb (cue Carrie references). Will Casper win her over? In the spirit of Ray Bradbury, yes and no. Carefully attend to Casper’s re-embodiment scene. It becomes clear that Kat would accept him only under conditions that he couldn’t permanently satisfy; and, perhaps, rightly so. The movie is bittersweet.
It also has more swearing and gross-out humor than your average children’s movie. (Again, see Silberling’s Land of the Lost, which, wisely, targets an older audience.) Casper’s plight might be at the movie’s center, but the tone is set by those hedonistic vulgarians, the uncles. Which is just as well: the core is perhaps too sad.
I liked the set design best of all. The run-down mansion is exquisite. There are lots of visual references to old movies – to Oz, especially. Afterward, I wanted to watch Casper again, to see how many references I could count; Land of the Lost, too.
