Casper 1995

[7.6/10] Casper is a bonkers mess of a movie. It’s about fifteen different things at once. It’s about a lonely boy looking for a friend. It’s about a young girl trying to find a place where she can put down roots and belong. It’s about a grown man trying to make friends and find solace after the loss of his wife. It’s about a father and daughter trying to shore up their relationship as each is growing and changing.

It’s about a conniving, cartoon-y bitch trying to get ghosts out of the home she just inherited so she can find some treasure. It’s about a ghost psychologist hired for the job who ends up bonding with his “patients”. It’s about a ghostly trio harassing anyone and everyone who walks through the door of their haunted house. It’s about the last wishes of the steampunk inventor who wanted to bring his ghostly son back.

It’s about a strange junior high love triangle involving the local pint-sized hunk and mean girl. It’s about a Mr. Burns/Smithers dynamic between the film’s antagonist and her lackey. It’s about a love story between a young woman and a young ghost. And it’s also about whether that young woman can successfully throw a party for her entire seventh grade class.

That would all be a lot even if this movie didn’t have to also make room for cameos and crossovers and random slapstick. And that’s all before you get to the film’s weird tonal shifts. One minute, bad guys are falling off of ledges and the world is operating under the laws of cartoon physics. The next, two preteens are meditating on what it is to die or lose someone at a young age, and two parents are reflecting on what it is to raise a child without one another. The sheer volume of tones and topics this humble film about a famously friendly ghost tries to capture is downright dizzying.

And yet, somehow, it all kind of hangs together. You kind of have to mee the movie where you find it, and balance out the cartoony protagonists and loony ghosts with the lived-in parent/child relationships and messy emotions of youth. But if you do, you’ll find a movie that is certainly all over the place, but undeniably entertaining and even endearing once you let it work its magic.

Much of that centers on the performances, which add life and depth where it may not necessarily be in the script. A young Christina Ricci bursts with personality as the sarcastic but sympathetic Kat, a young girl dragged across the country for her dad’s ghost-hunting who eventually befriends Casper. A paternal Bill Pullman plausibly plays the dorky but warm father figure, while also being the object of disaffection for the film’s jerkier spirits. And Malachi Pearson shines as the voice of the title character, giving him a spritely enthusiasm and youthful innocence that makes the creepier aspects of Casper’s ploys roll off the viewer for how earnest and guileless the kid seems.

But much of the credit there belongs to the film’s animators and special effects team, who masterfully integrate the main ghosts into the picture. Despite being nearly thirty years old, Casper’s visuals hold up. The great Looney Tunes-style humor of the Ghostly Trio works in part because the ghosts are animated with such visual panache that they work as analogues for the Bugs and Daffy crowd. The translucent look and expressiveness of Casper himself make the cute little guy easy to warm to. And the special effects team makes the live action characters’ physical interactions with the spooks completely seamless in a way that remains impressive.

Even apart from the ghosts themselves, Casper has its more exaggerated and caricatured elements. Carrigan and Dibs, the bad guy twosome in the film, are necessary to jumpstart the plot, but become pretty superfluous villains afterwards with antics that are too over the top to garner real laughs. Kat’s crush, Vic, and her mean girl rival, Amber, are too underwritten and generic as young adult story archetypes to leave an impact. And the whole business with Casper’s dad’s contraptions gets real goofy real fast.

And yet, what stuck with me when I watched this film as a child, and what still stands out to me now, is how real many of the emotions are, and how downright daring some of the conversations are that support them.

Casper’s “Can I keep you?” catch phrase to Kat is a little more unnerving as an adult given some unsettling elements of his dynamic with her. But he’s also recognizable as an innocent kid with a crush who feels loneliness, exuberance, and connection with someone. Him talking about the events that led to his death, and Kat worrying about forgetting her mother who passed away are softly heartbreaking.

Her dad, Dr. Harvey, finding solace in the ghosts who were antagonizing him since it’s so hard for him to make friends as a middle-aged widower is played a little more broadly, but is still sympathetic. Star Bill Pullman plays the man’s reaction to seeing his dead wife return to reassure him about how he’s raising their daughter with affecting seriousness, and her affirmation that she’s not a ghost with unfinished business given the love they shared in life is poignant and heartening. Even the conversations between Dr. Harvey and his daughter walk the line nicely between wry 1990s banter and relatable parent/child highs and lows.

As out there and often silly as this movie is, there’s the core of something real in even if its most outsized plot threads, which makes it stick to you in a way a shallower or less committed movie simply wouldn’t.

That helps the movie become more than the sum of its disparate and tonally mixed-up parts. There’s plenty of stories and scenes here that could use more time and space to breathe. But almost everything we get, from a heartfelt and honest conversation between two young adults, to the cartoony antics of the Looney Tunes-esque ghost crew, to a dad who’s alternatingly bumbling and pathos-ridden, works in its own way on its own terms. The result is a movie that’s a bit of a patchwork quilt, but also one that still feels easy, and welcoming, to wrap yourself in, all these years later.