Casper (1995)
(On TV, July 2019) Whenever we’re talking about older fantasy movies, one of the common refrains is how the film’s special effects have aged. This makes Casper especially surprising, given that it was the first film to feature full-CGI main characters (a few months before Toy Story), and yet the special effects hold up surprisingly well by today’s standards. It’s all thanks to some appropriate use of imperfect technology: The CGI characters in Casper are meant to be ghostly, transparent and interact loosely with their surroundings, which explains why many of the telltale signs we usually associate with bad CGI don’t register here. Fortunately, the film that the effects support does have its moments of interest. While the main plot isn’t particularly distinguished (and it dates most severely whenever the teenagers on-screen do something cool by mid-nineties standards), there are striking moments of dark humour to the proceedings, to the point where you may be tempted to double-check that the film isn’t directed by Tim Burton or Henry Selick (close! It’s Brad Silberling’s debut feature, later of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events). Christina Ricci certainly burnishes her credentials as a proto-goth here, while Bill Paxton has a warm turn as a ghost-obsessed but sympathetic widower dad. Casper doesn’t amount to much more than an entertaining film, but sometimes that’s more than enough.