Casper

It's a funny and often poignant film that's worth reexamining today.

t's aimed squarely at the tinies, but there is charm enough here to make it bearable for adults too.

A fairy tale with the soul of a rerun.

It's not clear why Steven Spielberg's Amblin decided to make a live-action entertainment starring the least interesting and most saccharine of all 50s cartoon characters.

Once the audience has become inured to the wide-eyed protagonist and impressive digitized effects, there's little sense of wonder or awe to be found.

The set design, however, merely disguises what is in fact an intimate and likeable picture.

Casper is a deeply tragic yet oddly wholesome coming-of-age tale about loneliness and grief. Though the film is essentially a meditation on death, it isn’t all doom and gloom. It still has its zany moments and mid-90s charm.

More like a Cinderella story than a gothic horror, this really was one of the most under-rated movies of the 1990s and should keep viewers of all ages engrossed on a slow summer holiday day.

...an erratic but generally passable adaptation that could've easily been much, much worse.

This movie was so important to me