Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

To be completely transparent, I do recall wanting to watch this movie and being in the room trying to watch it shortly after it came out. But it was a very large room with a lot of other things to do and I was very young and had a short attention span, and I don’t remember much beyond the fact that it was on the screen. I have much clearer, more recent memories, of a tie-in Pepsi commercial than I do of the movie itself. So I consider it more fair to review this as a “first time” watch than as a rewatch.

That said, this was probably my introduction to the world of Casper, though I may have seen some of the tie-in TV series. It looked so current and yet I’m sure I was also aware it was a property that had already been around.

After watching the movie:

Catherine Crittenden has no feeling for her dead father other than impatience for the fortune he was supposed to leave for her, and is incredibly frustrated that all she got as inheritance was the condemned mansion “Whipstaff Manor” in a small town in Maine. But when her attorney Dibs accidentally uncovers a secret message about a treasure hidden within the mansion, she drags him out to the place to search for it. They immediately run into a problem: the house is haunted. They first meet Casper, a friendly ghost child who is already almost too much for them, and then they get run out by his antisocial uncles Stretch, Stinkie, and Fatso, the “Ghostly Trio”. After the Trio defeat multiple attempts to get them out of the house, Casper causes Crittenden to find a news story about Dr. James Harvey, a widower who quit his conventional therapist job to become a “ghost therapist” helping spirits cross over while looking for the ghost of his dead wife. She hires him, and he and his skeptical and embarrassed daughter Kat move into the manor. While the Trio make it their mission to annoy James into leaving, Kat meets Casper, who quickly develops a crush on her. When Kat’s classmates learn she is living in Whipstaff, they insist on her hosting the Halloween Dance, and while she has her eye on a boy from class she hopes will go with her, Casper yearns to be the one to dance with Kat. Kat finds a room full of Casper’s old things, and he starts to remember who he was when he was alive, and his inventor father’s world-changing secrets hidden in Whipstaff Manor.

Maybe it’s because this was my most direct exposure to the world, but I think they recognized they had to get the style of the existing ghosts, particularly Casper himself, absolutely right for adapting the original cartoon design while making them blend with the live action world, and in my opinion they’re perfect. I think we see all of two new cartoon ghosts, but the problem with them is they have to match the cartoon style set by the others while also evoking the human actors, and this has mixed results. We also see Casper as a human briefly, and this boy from the 1800s has the most painfully 1990s child haircut ever, but it kind of works for evoking his bulbous head. I also noticed Whipstaff itself to be just slightly off kilter in design. Enough to make it feel like another world but not so much they seem like cartoon sets.

The story feels mostly disconnected from its setup in a different way from a typical excuse plot. Crittenden disappears for the second act, and once the Ghostly Trio are introduced and decide to have fun breaking James Harvey, they don’t get much to do until the setup to the third act. It’s only after the two or three layers of other characters are introduced that we get to the two that they’re all mostly there to justify the presence of: Kat and Casper. It’s not surprising they have the main plot thread, but everyone else feels less like subplot and more like comic relief road blocks to the advancement of the plot.

The third act has some weird pacing. The main villains get dealt with, there’s a major emotional moment for the Harveys that’s had all the weight rushed out of it, and a huge sacrifice made very casually and then it seems like it should be over, but there’s still half a dozen more loose ends to tie up in the next 20 minutes at the Halloween party and that’s treated not as a denouement but as the true climax, even though all the excitement from the previous sequence took all the air out of anything that could come next.

Despite the unorthodox plot balance, this movie delivers on its primary objectives of a lonely young ghost befriending a living girl and high quantities of paranormal slapstick, while also taking a peek into Casper’s lore. The script is one of the few places the movie may not quite meet expectations, but everything else makes up for it to the point that it’s still a charming experience.