Review of Casper`s Haunted Christmas

Introduction

Capitalising on the (fairly) recent feature-length movie’s success, Casper returns in this fully-animated adventure especially for Christmas (bit late now!). All the usual ghostly suspects are here, but this time minus Christina Ricci, Bill Pullman and the incomparable Eric Idle.

Video

The animation is of the computer generated 3D kind, as opposed to hand-drawn. Whilst nowhere near a match for Pixar and their Toy Story movies, the animation is not all that bad for what I presume is a straight-to-video release. The digital picture is therefore flawless, except...

Unfortunately the picture is Pan & Scanned 4:3! Note: the R1 release is in anamorphic widescreen.

Audio

A surprisingly good 5.1 audio mix is included – so obviously a theatrical release was in mind, if not here then in the States. Nothing spectaculer, but nothing to complain about either.

Features

Carlton, unlike so many other of their discs, have this time provided quite a few enjoyable extras here. The menus are nice, and of course biographies and a trailer are included, along with a rather tedious game to play.
What is a surprise is the featurette: it is excellent. Whilst not the longest of featurettes, it is fun and actually useful in letting us know how all those unknown voice actors and unheralded animators got on behind the scenes. A good selection here, but I must point out that the R1 version also has outtakes, along with the rest of the extras.

Conclusion

Casper’s Haunted Christmas is not a bad children’s’ movie, although not worthy of the first film. Some of the puns are indeed terrible, but they are delivered with such enthusiasm you can’t really resent it. There are also many references to other Christmas movies (Scrooge, It’s a Wonderful Life) to keep you parents interested if you are obliged to watch this. Better than your average kids’ rental movie. If, however, you are looking to buy, the R1 version seems a lot better.