Bundles of Joyce: Epic (aka Blue and Green Should Never Be Seen?)

I find it fascinating how in vogue the works of American children's author William Joyce were among animation bigwigs as the 2000s were going into the 2010s. In a period of roughly six years, we received no less than three feature adaptations of Joyce's books, each from a different Hollywood animation studio. Disney got in first on this trend, with the 2007 offering Meet The Robinsons, a loose re-working of Joyce's picture book A Day with Wilbur Robinson. In late 2012, DreamWorks' animation released Rise of The Guardians, taken from Joyce's book series The Guardians of Childhood, only for Blue Sky to round out this unofficial trilogy a few months later with Epic, their take on The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs. Joyce, who was also a prominent figure within the animation industry, having worked as a designer for Pixar's early features and a producer for Blue Sky's Robots (2005), had a finger in all three pies, serving as an executive producer for the Disney and DreamWorks entries and a screenwriter and production designer for Epic. A little project I've decided to set myself for 2025 is to provide a full retrospective of all three films, considering not only how they handle the themes and spirit of Joyce's works, but also the personal stamp that each studio managed to bring to the production. I'll admit to having a soft spot for this unsung triad; they basically all came and went, leaving nary a dent in zeitgeist, but stand out to me now as underrated examples of their respective studio's output, each very worthy of revisiting.

We'll be starting this retrospective with Epic - which was, chronologically, the last of the three to see the light of day, but this is a case where I'm allowing the seasons to dictate my ordering. Epic feels the most appropriate to be exploring during the transitional period between spring and summer, when the greenery is lush and the outside world is fully in bloom (the film is, specifically, set at the summer solstice, but I'm sure I can be forgiven for getting in a few weeks ahead). Meet The Robinsons, with its emphasis on overcoming regret and anticipating what the future will hold, seems better suited for the wistful days of a waning summer. The Rise of The Guardians technically takes place at Easter, but it so wants to be a Christmas movie and, as far as popular perception is concerned, it is a Christmas movie, so it can wait until the year is nearly through.

Besides, I have been wanting to get it off my chest for some time just how much I miss Blue Sky, now that they've been consigned to the Hollywood history books. They were not my favourite animation studio. I suspect they were the favourite of very few people, possessing neither the prestige of Pixar, the subversiveness of DreamWorks or Illumination's canniness in conceiving the most prolifically, nefariously merchandisable of characters. They were there, and they were relatively consistent, churning out Ice Age films on a regular basis, and projects that were generally pleasant, if unremarkable. It was easy to take them for granted. And yet when their closure was announced in April 2021, I and a lot of other animation fans felt very melancholic about the news. Just knowing that we'd lost a major voice in Hollywood animation felt like such a massive blow. I wouldn't say that I went as far as mourning the (ostensible) extinction of the Ice Age franchise, which had whittled down whatever patience I had remaining by its fourth installment, but I couldn't help but wonder about all of the other stories the studio might have told, and what new talent and direction could eventually have emerged that we would now never get to see in this timeline. In truth, the writing had already been on the wall for Blue Sky, as soon as their overlords at 20th Century Fox were acquired by Disney. The official explanation for the closure was that COVID-19 had made the studio's operations unsustainable, but even in late 2017, when the acquisition process was in its early stages, I remember there being a lot of speculation as to whether Disney would have sufficient interest in keeping Blue Sky going. They weren't exactly starving for animated output, and Blue Sky had spent much of the late 2010s struggling to find a money maker as reliable as the Ice Age franchise (which itself was beginning to show signs of diminishing financial returns with the fifth installment). Some might look on the development as the Circle of Life at its most unrelentingly brutal, as according to one of the testimonies in Dan Lund's 2005 documentary Dream On, Silly Dreamer, it was the overnight success of Blue Sky and the first Ice Age in 2002 that convinced the heads of Walt Disney Feature Animation to pull the plug on traditional animation. Blue Sky were, at one time, considered a threat by Disney. They played their part in redefining the course of Hollywood animation, only for Disney to ultimately claw its way back to the top, get itself into a position of authority over their former adversaries and to neutralise them without mercy.  As things stand, Annapurna Animation, which was founded by Blue Sky executives Robert L. Baird and Andrew Millstein in 2022, looks set to become their successor, their first release being Nimona (2023), a production previously scrapped under Disney's rule. Perhaps not surprisingly, the demise of Blue Sky wasn't enough to keep those pesky Ice Age critters from resurfacing - a spin-off film, The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, dropped on Disney+ in 2022 (sans most of the original voice cast) and Ice Age 6 has since been confirmed, but that's all Disney's bugbear now.

Let's go back to May of 2013, when all that drama was still a number of years away, and Epic was the freshest entry into Blue Sky's canon. The film had been in gestation since as far back as 2006 and at one point had apparently come very close to moving over to Pixar (now that would have been an interesting turn of events, especially given Pixar's otherwise total avoidance of doing adaptations, unless you want to count A Bug's Life as an adaptation of the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant). It pulled in decent enough numbers at the box office, but nothing that was likely to convince the studio to abandon Ice Age in favour of a Leaf Man franchise, and reviews fell largely within the lukewarm range. I confess that I wasn't overly enthusiastic about it at the time. But there is something about it that intrigues me, and over the years has slowly worked its way into my affections. In fact, these days I might even go so far as to call it the standout of Blue Sky's output. That might be a contentious opinion, since I reckon a lot of people would argue that The Peanuts Movie (2015) is where they peaked. And yes, The Peanuts Movie is a very sweet and warm and loving tribute to the brainkids of Charles M. Schulz, but here's the thing - if I want to spend time with Charlie Brown and friends, I'm still far more likely to watch the traditionally animated television specials. It's a nice film, but by its nature kind of a redundant one. Whereas Epic is one of those films with a curious, even ludicrous hold on my fascinations. It's no masterpiece, but its numerous glaring imperfections make it all the more enthralling to me. My obsession with Epic is one with trying to parse the tensions between a messy final product and an underlying maturity that feels like it was desperately trying to find its way out into the open.

Children's picture books don't always make the most auspicious starting point for feature storytelling. Consider Hollywood's chequered history of bringing the works of Dr Seuss to the big screen (Blue Sky's own attempt, Horton Hears A Who, is broadly considered one of the better examples, if not exactly a classic). The recurring challenge tends to be that picture books usually don't have sufficient plot to fill up feature length, so you have to add a lot of extra detail and narrative fussiness to stories that were designed to be told with brevity. On the other hand, picture books often make for enchanting examples of visual storytelling, and it stands to reason that a filmmaking creative might be inspired to want to recreate a bit of that graphic verve on a cinematic canvas. The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs is also a much more plot-driven picture book than A Day With Wilbur Robinson, so in theory Blue Sky should have had the advantage over Disney here. Let's dig in and see how they fared.

What is The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs about?

Published in 1996, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs tells the story of an elderly woman who loves her garden and recalls it being a place where magical things occurred in her childhood, although her memories are hazy as to the finer details. One day the woman falls ill, and her favourite item within the garden, a rosebush, begins to decline along with her. The grief of the woman's grandchildren is paralleled with that of the bugs who live in the garden and fear for the bush's future. A small metal toy that has lain lost in the garden for many years advises them to summon a legendary band of creatures known as the Leaf Men; to do so, they must ascend to the top of the tallest tree just as the full moon touches its topmost branch. A guild of doodlebugs (woodlice) makes the daring climb, and is opposed en route by the malicious Spider Queen and her ant minions, but manage to summon the Leaf Men, who defeat the Spider Queen. They then restore the rosebush to health and carry the Long-Lost Toy to the bedridden woman, along with one of the flowers from the bush. The woman is suddenly hit with a flood of memories, recalling that the toy and the rosebush were gifts from each of her parents as tokens of how they would always love and protect her. The woman recovers from her illness, and shares with her grandchildren the stories her parents told her in her childhood about the Leaf Men who lived in the garden and watched over it. Her grandson asks if the stories are true; the woman responds: "Things may come and things may go. But never forget - the garden is a miraculous place, and anything can happen on a beautiful moonlit night." The final illustration shows the bugs standing around a framed photograph of the woman as a small child, planting the rosebush with her parents. The book is dedicated to the memory of Joyce's friend John, described as his "brave, best pal".

 

How much of this is in Epic?

Not a lot. At this point I should highlight that the source story is specifically credited in Epic as the inspiration for the Leafmen characters ("Leafmen" being the stylisation the film prefers), which in itself is very telling. They are the only participants from Joyce's pages to have recognisably survived the transition to Hollywood blockbuster. Gone are the woman and her grandchildren, the doodlebugs, the Spider Queen, the ant goblins and the Long-Lost Toy.

Instead, the plot of Blue Sky's film focusses on the teenaged MK (voice of Amanda Seyfried), who following the death of her mother has returned to the home of her estranged father, Professor Radcliffe Bomba (Jason Sudeikis), an eccentric scientist attempting to prove the existence of a race of tiny humanoids in the local forest. MK takes one look at his research, decides that he's a lunatic and she should scarper, only to get shrunken down and caught up in the ongoing conflict between the very real Leafmen, promoters of life and growth within the forest, led by the hard-headed Ronin (Colin Farrell), and the sinister forces of decomposition, the Boggans, led by the smarmy Mandrake (Christop Waltz). The forest's ruler, floral being Queen Tara (Beyoncé Knowles), has just selected the pod set to bloom into her equally benevolent successor - but should the pod fall into Mandrake's hands, it will become corrupted, and the seed of the forest's inevitable destruction.

Director Chris Wedge called Joyce's original story "wonderful" but also "quaint", and cited Star Wars as the narrative the film more closely resembled. Between this film and Pixar's Lightyear, I am starting to think that it's maybe not such a great sign when an animated feature (or any type of feature) claims that it's specifically out to replicate the scale and feeling of Star Wars. Star Wars was one of those real lightning-in-a-bottle successes that Hollywood has been trying to emulate since the film's release in 1977, and learned many times over that it can't be done on demand. Still, in Epic's case, there is a certain poetic charm in the comparison. Star Wars was all about looking out to the galaxies beyond and wondering what kinds of vast, sweeping stories they could accommodate. Epic is about looking inward, at our own world, and wondering what kinds of similarly vast, sweeping stories might be happening on a microscopic level beneath our feet. There is plenty of magic, it argues, in the blades of grass growing beside our own doorstep, a view that is not out of step with the final assertion of Joyce's book. The Star Wars influence broadly manifests in the re-envisioning of the premise as a larger-scale struggle between forces of good and evil, but is at its most salient during a bird-racing sequence that seems consciously designed as a homage to the infamous pod race in The Phantom Menace (1999). Otherwise, comparisons feel more apt with Bill Kroyer's traditionally animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), another tale of a shrunken human accommodated by a race of tiny magical beings within a threatened forest.

Of the three Joyce feature adaptations, Epic is also notable for having the title that's furthest removed from its source material. The film's working title had been Leaf Men, and the decision to change it to Epic was apparently forced on the production by Fox's marketing department, to Wedge's chagrin (I do not blame him; Epic is a silly title). I can only assume that this was done in response to Disney's early-2010s love affair with vague, one-word titles designed to be snappy and to conceal any whiff of fairy tale quaintness (see Tangled, Brave, Frozen and the cancelled Gigantic).

 Where does Epic falter?

The translation from book to feature was an evidently uneasy one - there are five credited writers (including Joyce himself), a sign that it underwent multiple rewrites - with a finished production that feels like it's pulling in a myriad of directions. I can feel Blue Sky really wanting to grow and mature as a studio through this project. Wacky buddy comedies with talking animals were their bread and butter for most of their lifespan, so I did appreciate the attempt to craft a story with a noticeably more serious sense of adventure and mythology. Old habits die hard, however, and Epic isn't the radical break from the studio's formula that it might have been. The anthropomorphic minibeasts, though a part of Joyce's original story, muddle the world-building and mostly lower the tone (the non-anthropomorphic creatures, by contrast, are brought to life with flair and majesty, particularly a mouse that's able to be both adorable and wickedly threatening in the same sequence). The comic relief molluscs, Mub and Grub (Aziz Ansari, Chris O'Dowd), are very typical Blue Sky characters, heavily reminiscent of the possum duo from the Ice Age series, and so functionally useless as to suggest that they were worked in very late into the drafting process. The worst offender by far is an amphibian bookie voiced by Pitbull, whose screen presence proves mercifully minor. Every last detail about this character - his dialogue, his demeanor, his design, his wardrobe - marks him out as egregiously out of place within this world, and better suited to one of those "hip" and "modern" Beatrix Potter "adaptations" that weren't so far on the horizon.

Something else that I suspect was compromised between drafts are the environmental themes that go hand-in-hand with this type of setting, and feel frequently as though they're on the tip of the movie's tongue, only for it to pull back and play things entirely safe. The environmental themes in FernGully: The Last Rainforest are often criticised for being too broad and on the nose, but at the very least that film was entirely confident in what it intended to say via those themes. It's a cautionary story about humankind's sense of disconnect from the natural world, something that's challenged through the absorption of a man into a hidden world and his coming to see the consequences of his actions from a new perspective. As an eco-narrative, Epic seems hesitant to say anything much bolder than that the forest is good, and maybe mysterious. It's not that its environmental themes are more subtle than those of FernGully - more that they've been watered down to the point where they're barely present and, at times, barely coherent. We're told early on that, at its purest, the conflict between the Leafman and the Boggans constitutes a "balance", implying that both sides are playing a vital role in maintaining the forest, and that they might do well to look past their enmity and see their interactions as a form of as cooperation. This makes sense when we consider that decay is part of the process through which life is perpetuated. But it's belied through the depiction of one side as inherently good (identified as such in the opening narration) and the other as innately evil. The Star Wars model of a light side and a dark side seems curiously misapplied to the natural order.

But, enough carping. I've already established that Epic is no masterpiece, but I do think that it also has a lot going for it. The reason why it's slowly grown on me, particularly in the years since Blue Sky's closure, is that it is the picture that best exemplifies why I was so saddened to see them go. They were a studio that had the potential to grow into something much greater. They never quite got there, but you can see the glimmers of ambition and adroitness in this production. It's an incredibly good-looking film (there is a slight stiffness to some of the humanoid characters, but my god is that foliage to die for) and it takes itself and its world seriously whenever those molluscs and the (Pit)bullfrog aren't the focus. And for as little DNA from Joyce's book appears to survive in the final product, the hearts of the respective stories really aren't in such disparate places. There are themes from The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs that Epic carries over and recontextualises very ably into its revised setting.

 

What is The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs REALLY about?

Nestled in Joyce's quaint story of brave bugs and arboreal soldiers is an implicit message about death, loss and renewal. The woman's parents are presumably long-departed, but we see how they have continued to be an active part of her life through her relationship with her garden, the items that were tokens of her parents' devotion and the memories they created together. The Long-Lost Toy (aka the Metal Man), a gift from her father, represents a connection to childhood innocence that was not gone for good but lying dormant all this time, waiting to be rediscovered. The rosebush that was planted by her mother gives life and comfort but requires nurturing in return (much like Mother Nature) - when the woman falls ill and is unable to care for it, the bush shrivels, threatening the creatures that depend on it. The triumph of the doodlebugs and the Leaf Men over the Spider Queen is the triumph of hope and resilience against the forces of despair. The fate of the garden is linked to the fate of the woman, but at the end of the story we see her pass the baton to the incoming generation by telling her grandchildren of her parents' legacy, through the gifts they left behind and their stories of the Leaf Men who continue to watch over the garden. The inevitability of death is evoked in the woman's reflection that "Things may come and things may go," but the garden is upheld as a constant in which wonderful things may continue to happen. This ongoing cycle of parental (and grandparental) reassurance is intertwined with the broader cycle of life, with the natural world becoming a site in which youthful imagination and wonder may remain forever active. It is a connection to the past that sustains the present while holding the seeds for the future, and much like the memories of our departed loved ones, requires that we cherish and tend to it for it to remain fresh and vibrant.

 

And how much of this is in Epic?

At heart, Epic is not fundamentally a story about tiny people who live in the forest and battle pint-sized decay-spreading demons. All of that action adventure stuff is really window dressing to a story about a father and daughter re-establishing communication after years of silence and coming to terms with their mutual grief for the absent mother. It's the scenes in Bomba's abode, focusing on the interactions between the our two human participants, that I specifically find the most earnestly intriguing. Bomba is the film's strongest character, not least because his character design is the most distinctively Joyce-esque.

The initial interplay between MK and Bomba establishes that communication between both parties is totally defunct. MK does not take Bomba up on his offer of discussing her bereavement, insisting that she is working through it on her own terms. And Bomba in turn does not pay due attention to MK when she attempts to raise the possibility that she might do better to live independently. When the shrunken MK later returns to the house and attempts, in vain, to gain her father's attention, very little has effectively changed, with Bomba still failing to grasp what is right under his nose because his sights are focussed in the wrong direction. Bomba has dedicated years to a fruitless hunt for the legendary Leafmen, peering at the world by way of the assorted surveillance cameras and monitors he has installed around the area, revealing to him only leaves and hummingbirds (we discover that the Leafmen are well aware of this "stomper" on their trail, and have been purposely misdirecting him this whole time). There transpires to have been a hidden agenda to this seemingly psychotic preoccupation - Bomba later admits to MK that he became increasingly subsumed in his study of the Leafmen because he'd hoped that if he proved their existence it would bring her mother back to him (an end goal that was ultimately more delusional than his belief in the Leafmen). This obsession with a past that's already slipped him by has merely impeded his ability to take advantage of what is there for him in the present, allowing his relationship with his daughter to grow distant and stagnant in a way that's contrary to his desire to salvage the family he's thoroughly alienated. At one point, MK calls him out for being so fixated on taking advantage of every given opportunity to scout out the Leafmen that he misses an opportunity to be there for her as a father.

A prevalent theme of loss runs all throughout Epic, with most of the main characters grappling with some form of personal bereavement (this theme becomes all the more palpable with the knowledge that MK, or Mary Katherine, was named after Joyce's own daughter, who sadly passed away in 2010). Nod (Josh Hutcherson), the brash young leafman with eyes for MK, was taken under the wing of Ronin after the death of his biological father. Ronin suffers his own loss when Queen Tara, his long-running love interest, is fatally wounded protecting the pod (like MK, however, he chooses to keep his emotions bottled). Even the evil Boggans are not immune to feelings of grief. Adding a little dimension to Mandrake's villainy is that he is himself in mourning for his son and general Dagda (Blake Anderson), who is killed in an early confrontation with the Leafmen. Part of his motivation for seizing control of the pod is that he sees it as a way of regaining the heir that was taken from him. A very paternal figure, his quest becomes a darker echo of Bomba's objective of obtaining proof of the Leafmen in order to regain his lost life; both are scenarios in which destruction will invariably follow.

What MK and Bomba have in common is that both are alone in the world. Bomba has spent the last decade or so being shunned professionally and familially for devoting all of his time and energy to his crackpot research project, while MK has just lost her caregiver and emotional bedrock and been consigned to a man who is effectively a stranger to her. They spend the narrative in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a beautiful but remote wilderness that emphasises their sense of separation from anything beyond themselves, not least one another. There is, notably, only one other human character seen in the entire 102 minute runtime, that being the taxi driver (Judah Friedlander) who drops MK off at her new abode and promptly high tails it out of there. Bomba is absorbed in the Leafmen's domain in a figurative sense, lost in his aspirations of finding vindication and recovery within. MK's literal absorption, meanwhile, becomes a metaphor for her having to navigate through a big and overwhelming world in which she is seemingly all on her own, unable to make herself heard and at constant risk of being devoured whole. She finds solidarity in the Leafmen, who introduce her to their philosophy of "Many leaves, one tree", by which all things are connected and each individual becomes valuable in relation to a bigger picture. This is challenged by Mandrake, who proposes that the tree is ultimately indifferent to the fate of the individual leaf, pointing out that, "In the end, every leaf falls and dies alone". Mandrake gives a menacing voice to MK's feelings of parental abandonment, while the Leafmen, whose final display of unity is enough to decisively thwart the king of decay, become proxies for familial devotion, reaffirming the same sense of enduring parental security as they did in Joyce's book. The symbolism of nature as a force that nurtures and sustains us all is also discernible.

The rosebush and the Metal Man do not feature in the film, but there is a character who serves as a kind of equivalent to both, in the form of Ozzy, the three-legged, one-eyed pug who was the Bomba family's pet during their time of unity, and was left with the professor when MK and her mother moved out. Quite how long MK has spent apart from her father is not established, but it's clearly longer than the average pug's lifespan - on arriving at her father's home, MK is vocally surprised to be greeted by Ozzy and to discover that her childhood pet is still alive. The dog is a connection to a more innocent past, and an indication that her bond with her father is not as dead in the water as she assumes; Ozzy's battered physique reflects the damage inflicted on their relationship by their time apart, but his amazing vitality offers reassurance that their underlying love has ultimately endured. A photograph showing the young MK with her parents and Ozzy as a puppy features a couple of times in the story, echoing the photograph illustration seen at the end of Joyce's book. Ozzy's movements and actions often anticipate Bomba's, indicating that he functions as an extension of her father; he becomes an inadvertent threat to the shrunken MK right before Bomba unwittingly creates trouble for her, and he later saves MK from a Boggan, prefacing Bomba's coming to her aid at a crucial moment in the climax.

By the end of the film, MK and Bomba have succeeded in overcoming the hurdles that have prevented them from efficiently communicating. MK finds a way to let her father in on her location, by repositioning a thumb tack on his map of the forest, while Bomba is able to use the technology he's honed during his pursuit of the Leafmen to make MK intelligible to his ears. By the time MK has been restored to her proper size, she and her father are now firmly on the same page. The wilderness that once reflected their mutual isolation becomes a source of open affinity, with MK able to freely resume her dialogue with Nod via the surveillance monitors, mirroring the open communication she now enjoys with her father. Whether Bomba can get the wider scientific community on board with his latest findings now that he has his daughter to back him up is irrelevant - what matters is that the study of the Leafmen, a once contentious topic that kept them at odds, is now a means for them to grow and learn together. We leave with them racing out enthusiastically into the woods, eager to enhance their bond with their diminutive friends.

One criticism I do have of how Epic handles the theme of loss, compared to its source material, is that the deceased mother is never fleshed out in a way that causes her to feel like anything other than a plot device. We don't learn anything about her other than the most obvious details needed to kick the conflict into gear - ie: that she was close to MK and disapproved of her husband's research. The parents in The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs were never seen in the flesh, but had a distinct presence via the components of the garden and the memories the woman had created therein; you felt as though you knew so much about their relationship and they ways in which they were still being felt just by glancing at that poignant illustration of the Metal Man and the rose in her hand. Epic would have benefited from giving us at least a little more flavour of who MK's mother was, perhaps through an item of her own that she'd left behind at the house. But as a story about mending broken bridges and finding your way back into a kinship thought long-lost, it really is quite lovely. That we may perceive in it an expression of Joyce's own desire to reconnect with the real Mary Katherine makes it all the more poignant, and genuine.

In addition, I really do love that entire sequence with the predatory mouse. It so neatly exploits the fact that, when you view a mouse or rat's head from the underside, it does kind of resemble a shark.

Fly Away Home (aka Your House Is On Fire And Your Children Are Gone)

I've touched on this a few times in the past, but Hollywood doesn't make animal pictures the way it used to, not least because nowadays it barely seems to make animal pictures at all (real animals, not CGI monstrosities). When I was growing up, live action family films about overbearing St Bernards, demonic mice and romantic affairs between dolphins and terriers were a ubiquitous part of the multiplex experience. And true, few of these films were what you'd call prestige projects, with "animal flick" typically being code for undemanding kiddy fare (for every Babe, there were at least three Gordys), but every now and then you'd get a feature that conveyed a genuine fascination and affection for the animal in question. Fly Away Home, released in September 1996, is one such film, the subject in focus being Canada geese and their magnificent migratory techniques. It was directed by Carroll Ballard, whose previous directorial credits included two really outstanding animal features, The Black Stallion (1979) and Never Cry Wolf (1983), and he applies the same elegance and sophistication to this story about a flock of hand-reared geese finding their wings. It's another film from my childhood that I feel doesn't get anything close to the recognition it deserves. It sounds, on the surface, like a self-consciously quirky children's story that has to cling to its "but it really happened...kind of" testimonial for any guise of credibility. In other words, it could have gone the way of Andre (1994), one of the weaker animal pictures of the era. Fly Away Home, though, is a surprisingly hard-hitting experience. The film is pervaded by a strong sense of sadness and vulnerability, starting from the opening sequence, which shows a car crash from the perspective of its occupants to the sounds of Mary Chapin Carpenter. After a quieter middle, in which the characters lick and mull over their largely unspoken wounds, it builds to a transcendent third act where we experience the world from a birds' eye. I can't think of another picture, certainly from this ilk, that quite captures the thrill and the poignancy of personal growth and discovery with such dazzling use of perspective. I was fortunate enough to catch it in is theatrical run and there's a part of me that's always been a little haunted by it ever since. 2021 marks the film's 25th year, and it was always on my agenda to pay tribute to it. I probably would have waited until closer to the anniversary date itself, but it was such a good fit for the Home Sweet Home Blogathon being hosted by Realweegiemidget and Taking Up Room that it wound up being bumped to the front of the queue.

The plucky heroine of Fly Away Home is Amy Alden (Anna Paquin) a young adolescent whose contented existence with her mother (Deborah Verginella) in Auckland, New Zealand comes to an abrupt close when the two are involved in a road accident that only Amy survives. Amy is relocated to Ontario, Canada to live with her estranged father Thomas (Jeff Daniels), an eccentric sculptor who dabbles in aviation on the side. Amy initially struggles to readjust to her new environment, and to the notion of life having to resume some form of normality following her traumatic experience; she's resistant to the idea of attending school in Ontario, or of the prospective new family unit offered by Thomas's partner Susan (Dana Delany) and his brother David (Terry Kinney). Amy finds renewed motivation when she rescues a clutch of abandoned Canada goose eggs from the wreckage of a partially-bulldozed wilderness (pending development on which is the subject of great contention among the local community) and creates a family unit of her own by hatching sixteen goslings. The goslings dutifully follow Amy everywhere she goes, thanks to the phenomenon of filial imprinting, by which baby birds accept whatever being is waiting to greet them in their newly-hatched state as their mother. This creates a quandary when the time comes for her brood to fly south for the winter, for geese learn where to go by following their parents; otherwise, they end up all over the place and become a public nuisance, something local wildlife warden Glen Seifert (Jeremy Ratchford) is at pains to point out. When Seifert's proposed solution to pinion the birds doesn't go down well with Amy, Thomas devises a bold, potentially injudicious alternative; he'll build a custom ultralight aircraft for Amy and she can personally show them the route from Ontario to North Carolina. It's a solution which, finally, gives Thomas and Amy the opportunity to unite over a common goal...provided Amy doesn't break her neck en route, of course.

It was this aspect of the picture that raised some eyebrows among viewers, not least because, at the time of release, it had the misfortune of being overshadowed by a real-life tragedy. Contemporary critics, while largely enthusiastic about the film, noted that Amy's story bore an ominous resemblance to that of Jessica Dubroff, a seven-year-old girl who was killed only a few months prior while attempting a record-breaking flight across the United States with her father (media pressure to meet deadlines is deemed to have played a part in Dubroff's death, and perhaps this gave the portions of Fly Away Home where the media gets behind Amy's cause an unintentionally dark undertone back in 1996). On the film's DVD commentary, Ballard himself acknowledges that, of course, no parent in real life would expose their child to the level of risk that Thomas does Amy. But then to get too hung up on this point would be to subscribe to too literal a reading of the scenario, which is, in the end, best understood as a metaphor.

Fly Away Home is based on a true story, although the character of Amy is entirely fictitious. Thomas has a real-life equivalent in Bill Lishman, a Canadian sculptor and naturalist famed for his studies on imprinting and bird migration. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lishman conducted a number of experiments in getting imprinted geese to follow him in an ultralight aircraft, efforts that were depicted in the 1990 PBS documentary C'mon Geese. In 1993, Lishman was able to lead his geese on a successful migration, before expanding his attentions to whooping cranes and founding Operation Migration, a project dedicated to establishing a migratory route for the cranes between Wisconsin and Florida. Watching C'mon Geese, there is something incredibly, beautifully cinematic about the footage of Lishman taking flight with his geese, so it's hardly surprising that Hollywood wanted to utilise a piece of that magic to their own ends. The challenge came in dramatising Lishman's work in a narrative better suited to the needs of conventional storytelling. Hence the introduction of a younger protagonist, so that the visual splendour of the goose migration serves as an analogue to a coming of age story, in which Amy navigates her way both from childhood toward adulthood, and from loss to recovery.

 C'mon Geese (1990)

Fly Away Home formed part of a spate of pictures from the mid-1990s focusing on unlikely connections between troubled children and imperilled wildlife, the template for which was provided by the 1993 hit Free Willy. Here, the plight of the titular whale, abducted from the wild and held captive in a tiny pool in an amusement park, is echoed in the domestic trials of young hero Jesse (Jason James Ritchter), a juvenile delinquent struggling to come to terms with his mother's abandoning him, and to life with his long-suffering foster parents (Jayne Atkinson and Michael Madsen). The unruly child and disobedient whale bond, it's implied, through an intuitive sense of mutual displacement. At the end of the film, when Willy is returned to the ocean, so too has Jesse been restored to his own rightful place - not with his biological mother, as he had long hoped, but with his foster parents, whom Jesse now accepts as having filled the void left by his mother. The final line of the film, spoken by Jesse's adoptive parents, is "Let's go home", reinforcing the idea that Jesse's reinstatement to a family unit has been the end-goal of our journey all along. His acceptance of his foster parents, meanwhile, demonstrates that he has embraced change over a regression into the reassurances of childhood and is on route to becoming an adult, with his ability to part ways with his beloved whale signifying the final stage of his progression from alienated street kid to confident and responsible young man (albeit one rebellious enough to bust an orca from an aquarium). Therein lay the paradox of such pictures - they thrived on the charm and the spectacle of their human-animal interactions, yet the ultimate signifier of the child's growth typically came in their recognition that the animal was better off with its own kind in the wild. It was definitely a more sensitive rite of passage than that of old school Disney kid-and-their-animal pics like The Yearling (1946) and Old Yeller (1957), where the protagonist would demonstrate their emerging maturity by killing their four-legged companion, not least because it pointed to a world where humans and animals could co-exist, if not necessarily in close proximity. Other films within this category included the aforementioned Andre, Born To Be Wild (1995), Alaska (1996) and, in a handy intersection of the decade's eco-sensitivity and nostalgia for mid-century television, a cinematic reboot of Flipper (1996). To say nothing of the sequels and TV spin-off spawned by Free Willy (conveniently, Willy and Jesse had a habit of bumping into one another). It (1990) director Tommy Lee Wallace even tried his hand at the genre on the small screen, with a kinda-sorta sequel to the 1966 classic Born Free, Born Free: A New Adventure (1996). In this regard, Fly Away Home might be regarded as something of a formula picture. The basic elements are certainly all there - an alienated young protagonist from a broken or troubled home, a dislocated animal who provides the opportunity for healing and, above all, an emphasis on the need of the animal in question to remain wild and free, through which it doubled as a sort of totem to the newly-liberated spirits of its human cohorts. David Ingram, in Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema, likewise identifies Daniels' character as part of "a trend towards a more sensitive, less brutally macho type" of male hero in environmentalist pictures, while acknowledging that this often served as "an ideological ruse" to convey more conservative messages about the ascendancy of patriarchal power. (p.38) I suppose you can accuse Fly Away Home of both adhering to and inverting that trend. On the one hand, it centres heavily on a withdrawn father rediscovering and embracing his patriarchal prowess, after his erstwhile slackness on the matter caused his family to disintegrate. But it also diverges from tradition as it nears its conclusion, in suggesting that it is qualities gained more implicitly from her mother's influence that have enabled Amy to get as far as she has.

There is an eco-friendly message regarding the encroachment of human development on wild habitat, although in practice this exists primarily as a device to drive the narrative at two distinctive points. The initial threat comes from preliminary efforts to clear the local marshlands, which leads to the eggs being abandoned, and provides a couple of early scenes in which Thomas makes a stand for the surrounding wilderness, but as a narrative thread basically fizzles once it has fulfilled its purpose (although the lack of definitive resolution may well be the point). Later, we learn that the wildlife preserve in North Carolina where Thomas and Amy intend to lead the geese is also under threat from developers, and will be bulldozed if the geese do not arrive by a specified date. This turns Amy's climactic quest into a race against the clock, which is all well and good from a dramatic perspective, but also the point at which the narrative feels most conspicuously determined by the conventions of Hollywood formula. The suggestion that the geese may eventually end up with nowhere to fly to or from provides a slick thematic parallel with Amy's own displacement, and illustrates the omnipresence of the problem, but the final conflict ends up feeling rather arbitrary, with Ken James' developer becoming something of a stock antagonist, with too little presence or development to have much impact as a character. More effective in the villain seat is Ratchford as Seifert; he provides the film with yet another obligatory Hollywood beat when he abducts and impounds the geese on the night before take-off, forcing Amy and her family to pull off an adrenalin-baiting jailbreak the following morning. He also has minimal presence throughout the film, but in what little screen time he has conveys an unctuous, understated menace, which bubbles queasily to the surface through his wielding, of all mundanities, a pair of nail clippers.

What enables Fly Away Home to excel above most other pictures of its ilk is the cinematography, which is spectacular. The low-key performances, moody direction and endearing goslings are certainly enough to keep us engaged for the first two thirds of the narrative. But when Amy climbs aboard her custom aircraft and jets off for North Carolina, the picture really takes flight (pun intended) and becomes something else entirely. The succession of aerial images showcasing the North American landscape from above are an experience unto themselves - exhilarating, awe-inspiring, haunting and poetic. The excitement of the flight sequences, and the imagery of the formation of geese flying alongside Amy's aircraft capture the splendour and astoundment of Lishman's true-life experiments, but they are also a powerful illustration of the participants' own progression as characters. Appropriately, the narrative structure mirrors that of the geese's natural development - down-to-earth and unassuming for the first two acts, before taking to the air and realising its true potential. The dramatic new perspective speaks of Amy and Thomas's desire to rise above the pain that has weighed them down, and make their way to a better, more hopeful state of being. Which, of course, is the real purpose of the journey we're on. Not that the film doesn't convey a tremendous passion for the beauty of airborne avians, but it is clearly the underlying domestic drama that's driving this formation.

In part because of the sheer number of them, we don't get to relate to the geese as characters as we do Willy, Flipper and Elsa. In general, the film avoids anthropomorphism (the scene where Amy gets one of the geese to fly by berating it via radio is about the furthest it veers in that direction) and while there's an inevitably high adorability factor to the footage of them as ickle goslings, has little interest in coaxing AFV-style pet tricks from them (aside from one moment where a gosling loses its balance atop a toilet seat). Although Amy gives each of the geese a name and knows them all as individuals, only one goose, Igor, is given distinguishing characteristics from the viewer's perspective. Born with a limp, he lags behind his siblings and makes a reluctant flyer, eventually getting himself injured and necessitating that he make the journey strapped to the back of the aircraft. (Igor apparently existed and was injured in real life when Lisham landed his aircraft on top on him.) Igor plays an important role in ensuring that we maintain some sense of personal familiarity with the geese (particularly as they mature and their cuddliness inevitably wanes), but otherwise the geese exist largely as symbols, the beauty and majesty in their taking flight serving as additional manifestations of Amy and Thomas's newfound liberation, with their occasional skewing toward danger (such as when they become side-tracked by a flock of wild geese and fly frighteningly close to a group of hunters) signifying the risks and challenges that come with taking any bold leap. To fly is, of course, to put oneself in grave danger. This is the paradox facing Thomas, who understands that his means of redeeming his bond with his daughter also has the potential to go horribly wrong. (This is something that Thomas deliberates on, and his rationale, when challenged by Susan - that one is safer in the air than on a highway - doesn't exactly put our anxieties to rest, for the reasons cited by Roger Ebert: "I think the statistics he's thinking of apply to scheduled commercial airlines, not to planes that come in a box and you put them together yourself.") When viewed in a less literal sense, however, we might comprehend Thomas's willingness to allow his daughter to pilot her own aircraft as an acceptance of the risks that must be taken in enabling her to go forth and develop into her own person. We see shades of this in an earlier sequence where Amy objects (with the ferocity of an actual mother goose) to Seifert's attempts to clip her goslings' wings, and is not won over by his insistence that pinioning is for the good of the goose. Keeping the geese grounded would enable them to remain in her care forever but, as signified in the grotesqueness with which the act of pinioning is here represented (as Ballard acknowledges on the DVD commentary, it's made all the worse for being carried out with something as mundane as nail clippers), it amounts to breaking the spirit of the goose, denying them the opportunity to develop into the creatures they are destined to be. Amy gets to dwell more consciously on the difficulty of letting her adopted offspring go their own way, when she suggests that they combat the geese's instincts by keeping them in the barn during the winter, which Thomas points out would be little different to clipping their wings. The urge to fly will come regardless. This also applies to people and their metaphorical clipped or unclipped wings.

The film's working title was Flying Wild, and this title stuck for long enough to be featured in early trailers and promotional material (if you own a copy of the original US VHS release of Jumanji, for example, you can glimpse the Flying Wild trailer there). "Fly Away Home", though, feels like a better fit in terms of the film's central themes and its more implicit narrative, which concerns Amy's odyssey to recover her sense of personal belonging. It recalls a popular nursery rhyme - albeit one about insects, not birds - evoking imagery of domestic disruption, childhood vulnerability and parental absence: "Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home/your house is on fire and your children are gone." The burning house in the rhyme might be linked to the threatened marshlands favoured by the geese, to Amy's fractured psyche and to the familial discord between Amy and Thomas. The reference to absent (or dead) children suggests the estrangement that existed between Amy and Thomas for years, and Amy's lingering alienation. The ladybird, meanwhile, evokes both the robust maternal urges of Amy toward her adopted brood, or a call to arms to Thomas to step up and take charge of the daughter he has ignored for so long.

We never learn exactly what caused the relationship between Amy's mother and father to break down, a question that has long haunted Amy. The best explanation is that they were driven in fundamentally different directions - Amy had heard from her mother that they were both artists, and artists tend by nature to be selfish. There are two items in Thomas's barn that appear to symbolise the turmoils of the family's past - a tire swing, which Amy can vaguely recall being pushed in by her mother at age 3, and the large and imposing model that overlooks it, a life-sized replica of the lunar lander module. The tire swing, which provides Amy with a hazy connection to a time when her family were together, symbolises a lost innocence, but her attachment to it is double-edged. When the present-day Amy is seen swinging upon it, she does so with a dissatisfied vigour that is indicative of her frustration and desire to outgrow her disrupted childhood and take flight (literally and metaphorically). The lunar lander, while it is the crowing achievement of Thomas's work as a sculptor and has attracted a number of lucrative offers from prospective buyers, is the haunting embodiment of the family's estrangement. Probably not coincidentally, Thomas was compelled to build the ridiculous artefact around the time that Amy and her mother left, his rationale being that, "They left [the original] there. It's parked. So we needed another one. So I made an exact replica." We sense that the passion and energy Thomas poured into this project was redirected from the energy he was unable or unwilling to put into salvaging his relationship with his wife and daughter, but it also stands as a testament to his desire to make himself unreachable in the aftermath. Toward the end of the film, when Amy asks Thomas why he never came to visit her as a child, he tells her that New Zealand is a long way from Canada, which she retorts is a lame excuse. But then to Thomas, being parked on the moon and being situated on the other side of the Pacific ocean amounted to much the same thing. He found the gulf of the separation, physical and emotional, unendurable, and in lieu of attempting to repair those broken bridges, he wrote them off as gone and immersed himself in a substitute in the form of his work. He maintains his emotional wall even when Amy re-enters his care, ensuring that she's fed and attends school but generally keeping himself to himself in his shop and leaving Amy to amble around the property by her lonesome. When Thomas resolves to assist Amy in flying her geese to North Carolina, he finances his new project by selling the lunar lander, a sign that he is finally starting to emerge from his own proverbial shell and assume responsibility for Amy, not merely as a caregiver but in actively repairing the wreckage created by her upheaval and their decade of estrangement.

The implicit narrative of Fly Away Home deals with Amy's quest to find her own way home, the home in question being a metaphorical one pertaining to identity and affinity. The life she knew with her mother is now gone, the life she once had with her father is only a faded memory; where is she to roost in the present when she has nothing solid to which to hold? But there is another dimension to this implicit narrative, regarding Thomas's own quest for redemption. It is hard to miss the parallel between the gosling's predicament and Amy's, signposted particularly prominently in Seifert's warning that, "Without parental influence they'll get the urge to fly but won't know where they're going." (For as unsettling as he is, Seifert provides us with a heck of a lot of invaluable exposition.) He's talking about the geese, but his words are also evocative of Amy's estrangement, and how the respective absences of both her mother and her father has left her emotionally adrift. Thus, when Thomas leads Amy and the geese on their daring journey across North America, he is actually showing her the way, not simply to North Carolina, but out of her grief and despondency toward a renewed sense of purpose and connection, much as a goose would teach its offspring how to thrive in a turbulent world. Thomas's aviator callsign is "Papa goose", and it seems that he is indeed entirely worthy of his title. Amy, naturally, answers to the callsign "Mama goose", which is indicative her role as surrogate mother to sixteen anserine devotees, and much more.

Home for Amy ultimately represents a purer state where she is able to maintain a firm connection to both her mother and father. This is not equivalent to the innocence represented in the tire swing, something that belongs to an altogether different time, when Amy was small and her family was still physically united. Instead, Amy finds her new emotional pillar through her repaired bond with her father, and a renewed sense of her mother's continued presence in her life. As much as the flight has pivoted on the bond between Amy and Thomas, in the end it proves to be the figurative recovery of Amy's mother that enables her to complete her journey. Things go awry toward the end when Thomas's plane crashes, leaving him stranded in a field with a dislocated shoulder, and he tells Amy that she must complete the last leg of the journey alone. Amy panics, believing that she cannot find her way without her father, but Thomas assures her that she won't be without parental influence - her mother will be guiding her. This takes us into the only point in the narrative in which Amy explicitly ruminates on her feelings of bereavement, and Thomas finally assists her with coming to terms with her loss. The understanding of death as being followed by renewal, with each new generation carrying the anima of the old (literally or metaphorically), is evoked when Thomas tells Amy that her mother is in the geese she has nurtured, and also when he calls to mind the extent that Amy has become her mother's successor: "She was brave...she went off, followed her dream. Nobody helped her. You have that strength in you too." Although the journey has largely functioned as a means of re-establishing the bond between father and daughter, and reaffirming Thomas's role as the leader of the family he had once allowed to go stray, it ultimately serves a very different purpose, in enabling Amy to take her first steps toward womanhood and discover her own independent ability to pilot her way through hardship, thanks to the knowledge and attributes she has gained from each of her parents.

Fly Away Home concludes with a sequence depicting the geese splashing animatedly around their new grounds in North Carolina while bathed in a golden sunlight that evokes both the triumphant preservation of their intrinsically wild, unbound nature, and a sense of optimism regarding the future of their territory, which Amy has not only led them to but also secured for them through her efforts. As with Free Willy, the film ends with a stealthy reminder as to whose journey we have really been following, by settling on a freeze frame of Amy and Thomas, the former's head rested upon on the latter's shoulder, proof that their bond has been restored and that Amy now has a secure bedrock from which to define herself going forward. There is, however, a non-dialogue epilogue that plays over the closing credits, in which Amy, now back at her father's house in Ontario, awakens one morning the following spring to find that her geese are returning. This was the dual victory of Lishman's endeavors - once the geese had been shown the migratory route, they were able to make the journey back on their own, which in the context of Amy's story, serves as an additional affirmation of her newfound independence (Thomas, notably, is absent from this sequence). More significantly still, we close the picture with another cycle renewing itself in the form of a joyful reunion, which is evocative of something lost being recovered. The epilogue is thus indicative not only of Amy's success as a mother goose, but also of her own mother's symbolic return. Throughout the film, we catch only fleeting glimpses of Amy's mother - she appears briefly in the title sequence, after which she exists only hazily, in snippets of memories, photographs on walls and in Amy's attempts, in one scene, to recreate her by dressing in her clothing. But she has such a haunting, underlying presence through what goes largely unexpressed that we sense that this has been the real end-goal of Amy's journey all along - to locate and preserve her mother by giving her some form of tangibility in the present. It seems only appropriate for her free-spirited mother to have the last word, albeit in the form of sixteen Canada geese, as Thomas had promised us she would.

Fluke (aka When Will I See You Again?)

So, did you hear the one about the man who was reincarnated as a dog and attempting to avenge his own murder?

As a premise, it's more common than you might think. At the very least, Carlo Carlei's 1995 film Fluke wasn't the first to use this set-up. In 1980 there was Oh! Heavenly Dog in which Benjean (yes, our dear friend Benjean) played the reincarnated Chevy Chase, who was brought back in the form of a dog so that he could have a crack at deciphering who ended his life as a human. The kicker being that that was actually a variation on a 1951 film, You Never Can Tell, in which the boot was on the other foot, and a dog was restored to life in human form in order to get even with the canine butcher who bumped him off in his previous life. In 1990, the world came dangerously close to getting a TV series called Poochinski, in which Peter Boyle played a Chicago police detective killed in the line of duty who comes back as a bulldog, intending to pick up right where he left off, except the networks thought better and it never got past the pilot stage. The "man comes back as dog and attempts to get to the bottom of the circumstances of his death" subgenre is such well-trodden territory, in fact, that I'd be curious to know if there are any variations on this theme with other animal species. Is nobody curious to see how the scenario would play out if the murder victim came back as a cat?

I have a lot of sympathy for Fluke, yet another deceptively simple 1990s family film that I feel never got its fair dues. But then this oddball little mongrel was frankly always destined to be a misfit. It's too strange, and too discordant a beast to hold much mass appeal. Despite its ostensibly goofy appearance, it's not a comedy and, a smart-mouthed mutt voiced by Samuel L. Jackson notwithstanding, has very little in the way of mirth. There are a few moments of authentic horror that bare their teeth every so often without ever quite going the full mile. And while there's no shortage of endearing imagery with cuddly puppies, particularly in the early stages, these are too anxiety-inducing to evoke much pleasure; what you mainly feel is the vulnerability of these little beings in a world that doesn't readily yield compassion to outsiders, even when they are as lovable as a newborn Lab. Above all, it's a very, very downbeat story, no matter how positive its parting message and how bright and uplifting its closing moments. The kids (and adults) who would most enjoy this movie would either have to be devoted dog lovers or have one heck of a strong masochistic bent. If you ride along with Fluke, then know that your emotions are going to be reduced to a spectacular smoking wreckage. Myself, I'm just the glutton for that level of punishment. On top of which, I have this thing for stories about reincarnation. For some reason, I just like them. Even Emile Ardolino's Electra complex-centred Chances Are (1989), which sets many other skins a-crawling.

The eponymous Fluke is a stray Labrador-mix (voice of Sam Gifaldi, and later Matthew Modine) who dreams of being a man. Or, more accurately, he's bothered by persistent nightmares of being human and eventually deduces that these are memories of a former life. For Fluke is indeed the reincarnated spirit of Thomas P. Johnson (also Modine), a young businessman who was killed in a car crash that Fluke's gut instincts tell him was no accident. As a puppy, he's impounded and earmarked for death, but pulls off a daring escape and is adopted by a bag lady named Bella (Collin Wilcox Paxton), who gives him his enigmatic moniker. Shortly afterwards, Bella dies (and is reincarnated as a firefly, recalling a poem by Rabindranath Tagore she cited earlier) and Fluke finds a new custodian in an adult dog named Rumbo (voice of Samuel L. Jackson), who belongs to a junkyard owner, Boss (Jon Polito), but regularly scrounges food from a vendor named Bert (Bill Cobbs). Fluke comes of age, and for a while lives quite happily as Rumbo's cohort. But those nightmarish visions of his previous existence as Thomas P. Johnson still persist, to the point where Fluke feels the urge to leave his new life behind and seek out his former wife Carol (Nancy Travis) and son Brian (Max Pomeranc), under the belief that they are threatened by the sinister male figure who regularly encroaches on his visions (Eric Stoltz), and whom Fluke suspects of being his killer.

Fluke was based on a novel by James Herbert, who is better known for writing one of literature's most infamous works of rat horror (we'll get to that, no doubt). It's not exactly a children's book, although it's probably fine for older children to read it. Compared to Herbert's original story, Carlei's film is a decidedly more sentimental creature, and a notch more family-friendly (Carlei's film gets pretty intense in places, but you could have made a darker picture still from Herbert's novel). The basic concept of a dog realising that he was a human in a past life and attempting to find his way back to his former family is recreated more-or-less faithfully, although the film does take several liberties with Herbert's story in order to fit it into a more conventional Hollywood mold. The most crucial difference is that Fluke's relationship with his family is much more of a focal point in the film than it was in the novel. Herbert's book was more focused on the journey itself, and the process by which Fluke comes to grips with the concept of being a man trapped in a dog's body; by the time Fluke actually reunites with his family, the story's nearly over. Herbert's book is also more episodic than Carlei's film; the second half consists primarily of assorted interludes that serve only to sidetrack Fluke from his main objective, many of them quite desultory in nature - eg: his time spent living with a sociopathic old lady whom he initially mistakes for kindly and harmless, and his short-lived partnership with a conniving vixen who exploits his trusting nature. The film cuts out all of these extraneous adventures and substitutes with expanded story material of its own. Not all of this new material works, but overall I think that Carlei's film does a good job of capturing the essence of Herbert's book, and its various meditations on life, death and the importance of accepting change and moving forward, while taming Herbert's rather flabbily-structured story into something altogether more focused and efficient. What the film inevitably sacrifices, to the narrative's detriment, is most of the detail concerning Fluke's somewhat split personality, and the tension between the dog and human portions of his mind - for example, Fluke frequently gets confused as to whether knowledge that comes to him naturally is via instinct or something he remembers from his past life as a man. The book is related (almost) entirely from Fluke's point of view, and while the film still incorporates his voice-over narration, it doesn't have the luxury of having quite the same direct line into Fluke's thought processes. In the film, we do have the problem that many of Fluke's attempts to reconnect with the human part of his psyche - such as when he operates a telephone or puts on one of Thomas's hats - look more like dumb pet tricks than a dog sincerely trying to be a man.

Fluke came out in the summer of 1995, a year which saw several landmark changes in terms of how computer generated imagery was altering the cinematic landscape, many of them occurring within the arena of family cinema. Casper was the first feature to incorporate a fully computer generated main character, Toy Story was the first all-CG animated feature, and Babe rewrote the rule book where talking animal pictures we concerned. Earlier talking animal features such as Homeward Bound and Look Who's Talking Now had largely depended on an approach in which the human voice-over was slapped atop the animal footage to give the impression that the animals were communicating with some kind of inner voice (although we can go back even further, to those Francis The Mule pictures, where the animal's mouth was manipulated using wires). Babe, though, made it standard practice to digitally manipulate the footage so as to look as though the animals' mouths were moving along with their dialogue. The results were so impressive that in the succeeding years, films with talking animals whose mouths moved became a popular novelty. (Unfortunately, I think that Hollywood took the wrong lesson from Babe - there, it worked a treat because the production never allowed the spectacle of the technology to run away with the picture, and managed to deftly incorporate it with the animals' natural movements and mannerisms. Compare it to Cats & Dogs from six years later, which attempted to combine real animals with a rubbery, Loony Tunes-esque energy, and the results looked eye-searingly ugly; Cats & Dogs was apparently conceived as an animated film, and would have done much better to have remained one.) Fluke, which uses the old-school Look Who's Talking technique, was released to theatres a couple of months ahead of Babe, and no doubt seemed immediately dated and lacklustre by comparison. The approach in Fluke does seem considerably less lively and immersive than that of Babe, although the idea that the animals communicate telepathically rather than orally is both addressed explicitly in the script and entirely faithful to Herbert's novel. As I mentioned in my coverage of Mouse Hunt from earlier this year, live action animal movies, talking or otherwise, seem to have largely fallen out of fashion in the current cinematic climate. Just this year, Dolittle and The Call of The Wild found little favour at the box office, and that was before the Coronavirus had really had the chance to mess things up. They were ubiquitous throughout my own childhood, however, and I'd certainly rate Fluke as one of the stronger examples. It's neither as disarming or as innovative as Babe, nor does it have the twisted personality of Mouse Hunt, but it's an unusual picture (despite the familiarity of its premise), one that tackles its morbid subject matter with an unassuming earnestness and conveys a few straightforward but effective meditations on bereavement, resilience and mortality. Like Herbert's original, it's a flawed work, but fascinating.

Fluke also fits in with another category of films that seemed to crop up a lot in the 1990s, in which a (normally) negligent father dies, is reborn in some awkward new form and gets a second chance to forge a meaningful relationship with the child for whom he (typically) never made time on his first go around. For other variations on this theme see And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird (1991) and Jack Frost (1998). The longer Fluke spends in the company of his family, the more of a picture we get of the kind of life he once led, and it becomes apparent that, as Thomas, he wasn't exactly the most conscientious husband or father, preferring to neglect Carol and Brian in favour of strengthening his business. So getting to be with them once again, even regulated to the role of family pet, presents a tremendous opportunity to see and understand them in ways that had previously passed him by. Yet Fluke is surprisingly cautious on the whole idea of revisiting the past in order to right old wrongs. It is a redemptive story, in that Fluke's experiences as a dog leave him with a renewed perspective and appreciation for life that was totally lost on him as a human, but it ultimately serves to bear out Rumbo's reflections that, "There's no going back - you can't be sorry for what's been. You've got to be." The harshest lesson Fluke has to learn is that his desire to be re-assimilated into his old family, however sincere, is misguided. Shortly before Fluke is reunited with Carol and Brian, he's greeted by the "STOP" sign on the side of a school bus, a clear warning from the cosmos not to proceed, but one that either does not register with Fluke or that he chooses to ignore.

The entire plot point about Thomas being a negligent husband and father is exclusive to the movie; in the book, the relationship that Nigel Nettle (for 'twas his name) had with his kin isn't explored in any substantial depth. In both cases, however, Fluke's urge to be reunited with his family is driven by a basic inability to let go of the past, something that very nearly leads to tragedy for them all. At the end of the book, Fluke muses that, "a ghost had been vanquished. That ghost was my humanness." In the film, there is the added complexity that Fluke is mourning for the life he could otherwise have led, not only if he hadn't died, but if he'd taken advantage of the opportunities he had while they were available to him. Part of what drives Fluke is regret and the recognition that he squandered his time as a human. But as Rumbo says, there can be no going back. At first, the positive bonds Fluke reforges with Carol and Brian convinces him that returning to them was the right thing, and that he has been restored to his proper place: "This was where I really belonged. Sooner or later, I'd find a way to tell them who I really was." But of course, he can't. There is a fundamental communication barrier that cannot be broken. And as much as Fluke would love to resume his role as Thomas and pick up where things left off, the world as he once knew it is changing. Years have passed since Thomas's death, and while his family still mourn their loss, there are ways in which they are beginning to heal and continue their lives without him, something that Fluke finds utterly unfathomable. His regained bliss is disturbed the instant that Stolz's character, Jeff, finally appears in person, and a darker impulse suddenly awakens in Fluke. He becomes a savage, snarling beast, at which point his newly-carved niche as family pet is in serious jeopardy.

Jeff, Thomas's former business partner and Carol's present lover, is portrayed as fairly brooding figure for much of the film, and the viewer is encouraged to share in Fluke's suspicions of him, but - spoilers - these turn out to be red herrings designed to throw us off the scent of the more troubling underlying motive that has been unconsciously driving Fluke this entire time. In the film's pivotal plot twist, it is revealed that Jeff was not, in fact, Thomas's killer. To the contrary, he attempted revive Thomas after his accident, something that Fluke only recalls after he's launched a brutal attack on Jeff from the backseat of his car, causing him to crash and potentially killing them both. Jeff might not have murdered Thomas (who was not murdered at all, but rather a victim of his own recklessness), but Fluke recognises him as an existential threat to everything he was as Thomas, and his reaction is one of jealous retribution. Jeff's real transgression is in attempting to take Thomas's place, both personally and professionally - he now has full ownership of Thomas's business, and has his sights set on marrying Carol. Fluke's uncontrollable hostility toward Jeff is, on the dog level, a manifestation of his primal desire to defend his territory, but it is in service of a very human resistance to the entire notion of life going on without him. His desire to return to his family has less to do with protecting them from any phantom threat than with imposing himself on the world he'd left behind and preserving his own legacy. In other words, the human ego is still very much alive and thriving. This element is present in Herbert's novel, in which part of Fluke's rage toward Jeff's literary counterpart, Reg, stems from seeing the words "Never Forgotten" on his tombstone and believing this to be flagrantly untrue. However, Fluke later returns to the grave and notes that fresh flowers have been laid there, at which point he comes to terms with the idea that his family finding renewed purpose after his death should not be seen as an affront to his memory: "The memory of the husband, the father, the friend would dull with time, but I'd always be somewhere in the corner of their minds." Fluke's personal odyssey entails the coming to terms with his own loss, of the man he once was and, in the film, the man he senses he could have been had he lived his life differently. He comes to accept that the time for both has now passed, and rather than spend his current existence pining for what has gone, he must relinquish his grip on his family and allow them the freedom to grow and develop in their changing circumstances, even if it means having to go his own separate way. The film's other key message is conveyed in Rumbo's musing that, "Love hurts". Pain and loss are to be accepted as an unavoidable part of life.

As noted, Carlei's film isn't perfect, its most glaring weakness being a narrative thread involving Ron Perlman (better known as the future Hellboy), who has a sideline in harvesting stray dogs and selling them to vivisection labs. This is one of the film's original creations, for no such thread occurs in Herbert's book. Here, it's a bizarre and unpleasant tangent that's quickly forgotten (although Herbert's book had no shortage of those, hence the whole wretched saga with Miss Birdle) - its sole purpose, in narrative terms, is to bring about Rumbo's death. On that note, Rumbo's dying revelation - that he too was once a human - falls slightly flat as a plot twist. We, like Fluke, suspect that Rumbo was also a human in a former life, and when, mortally wounded, he admits to Fluke that he used to be Bert's brother, it's a touching moment, but its impact is somewhat blunted by the fact that you at home will have figured out Rumbo's former identity long before he tells Fluke. There is a visual clue from earlier in the film that is implemented with a woeful lack of subtlety. Incidentally, I recall once reading a criticism of the laboratory scene which made specific note of the moment where Rumbo activates a button that opens the door to all the animals' cages, in a manner described by the reviewer as being very "un-dog-like". True, it does look goofy as hell, although you would do well to keep in mind that Rumbo is a dog who retains memories of being human (a concept not explored in as much detail as in the book), so some anthropomorphisms must be permitted. The greater oddity is why the lab would have such a plot-convenient button in the first place. It is, however, a circle, and the idea of a circle governing all is a highly enticing one in the context of this particular story.

Circles are an important recurring motif throughout Fluke - it opens with a shot of the Earth as seen from outer space, a curiously grandiose starting point for a film that spends most of its time surveying the world from the dog's eye-view. We also have the circular holes through which chemicals are administered to Fluke's eyes during his mercifully brief stint as a lab animal and, most prominently of all, the engagement ring that Thomas presents to Carol in a flashback sequence, with the assurance that, "Two connected circles mean forever". Thomas correctly identifies the representation of eternity, but possesses a misguided understanding as to what "forever" actually entails. It is not, as he assumes, a matter of everything maintaining a fixed and permanent state. The circle symbolises the ongoing cycle of life, and the process by which it is constantly renewed and perpetuated. Everything has its time and its place and, eventually, all things must pass, but the circle is evocative of the idea that within this process there is no discernible beginning or end. Things simply move from one state to another and, through that, the basic essence of life endures and continues, forever finding its way back along the cycle of life, death and renewal. The circle also symbolises interconnectivity, and the notion that everything is intrinsically linked, hence the opening shot of the Earth, indicating that Fluke's story is just one of many in a sprawling network of beings all attempting to navigate their way through a vast and intimidating cosmos, something that Fluke contemplates in his closing narration. Paths may intersect along the way, but everything inevitably has to continue along its own route. Meanwhile, the title and character name of "Fluke", much like the title of Ardolino's aforementioned Chances Are, points to the capriciousness of existence, and to the chance encounters that enable individual lives to intersect and leave their respective marks on one another - in the case of Fluke/Thomas and his family, at least twice.

Although Fluke is told from the perspective of the deceased, his journey can, if you like, be interpreted as an allegory for the bereaved themselves successfully coming through the grieving process, with Fluke's final decision to "release" his family signifying the lessening of grief and the accommodation of memory in such a way that it is no longer debilitating. As Fluke observes at the end of the book, a ghost has been vanquished. The film also functions as an affecting plea for a greater appreciation and respect for non-human forms of life, and for their part in the ongoing proliferation and continuation of life (although if Herbert was going for such a message in his novel then I think there is a definite point at which he royally blows it).

In both Herbert's novel and Carlei's film, Fluke survives the second crash and atones for his grotesque error of judgement by reviving the unconscious Reg/Jeff, after which he goes his own way. The film, however, gives additional closure to Fluke's relationship with his family, which in the book comes about more obliquely via those freshly-laid flowers. Here, Fluke gets to make one last ditch attempt to communicate to Carol who he really is, by scratching at the "forever" engraving on Thomas's tombstone (thus recalling the words of his marriage proposal), and apparently succeeds - Carol does not make her newfound knowledge explicit, but is visibly aghast as Fluke limps away. Fluke ends his bond with Carol, at least in the direct sense, by once again emphasising the eternal nature of the connection they forged, which is now understood to refer not to permanence or possession, but to something far broader - the level on which all things remain connected, and are constantly affecting and perpetuating one another. Fluke then leaves them for good, having decided that his family have a right to move on with their lives and that his presence would only be an obstruction; all he can do now is accept his life as a dog and find the pleasure and value in that. The last glimpse we see of the Johnsons shows Jeff, fully recovered from his injuries, returning to the family home and presenting Brian with a new puppy. They may be fully restored as a family unit, with Jeff now filling the void left by Thomas, but the puppy signifies the extent to which Fluke/Thomas's own legacy will continue in their lives; by simply intervening a second time around he has left another mark and created an additional void that needs filling. The young life likewise represents a new beginning, the continuation of yet another individual story that has intersected the family's own - there is a brief moment where Carol, still haunted by her final encounter with Fluke, stares the puppy intently in the eyes, as if contemplating the likelihood that it too was human in a former life.

Above all, Carlei's film teaches that where one door closes, another opens, as is demonstrated in the final moments, when Fluke, having retreated deep into the wilderness, encounters a squirrel, who is revealed to be Rumbo in his latest form. Once again, sheer fluke has enabled two familiar paths to intersect, although things are not quite as they were before, and perhaps that's even a good thing. Rumbo's excitement at getting to regale his old friend with the ins and outs of being a squirrel presents this impermanence as something to be embraced, for with every change comes the opportunity to see and understand the world from a fresh and exciting new angle. This is reinforced in a brief post-credits scene, which shows Rumbo (as a dog) and Fluke (as a puppy) running together, indicating that we have, in a metaphorical sense, returned to the beginning of the story, with their friendship newly rejuvenated and many further adventures lying ahead of them.

Here are some additional differences between Carlei's film and Herbert's novel:

• The book is set in the United Kingdom, whereas the film relocates the action to the States.
• Bella is in the book, but is a fairly different character. There, she is not homeless, and lives with her abusive, alcoholic son. She still takes in Fluke off the streets and feeds him, but is forced to turn him out when her son disapproves. In the book, Bella does not die, let alone get reincarnated as a firefly. Her main function in the film - to give Fluke his name - is in the book fulfilled by a junkyard worker named Lenny. In both cases, Fluke receives his name through his ability to play the shell game.
• The film (thankfully!) excises all of the details about Rumbo's passion for rat killing, including a confrontation with an unusually articulate rat who is hinted to also have some memory of his former life as a human. Sadly, it doesn't go in the rat's favour. Let's just say that I like movie Rumbo a whole lot better than book Rumbo. Movie Rumbo does not seem to share book Rumbo's prejudices, for he helps rats by freeing them at the lab.
• As noted, the entire vivisection lab arc occurs only the film. In the book, Rumbo is killed during a police raid on the junk yard when a pile of debris collapses on him. Furthermore, he dies immediately, and never confesses to Fluke that he was once human.
• There are literal ghosts in the book too, something not represented in the movie. In the book, they're a strange outlier, and have no obvious story purpose.
• In addition to the interludes with Miss Birdle and the vixen, the book has a chapter in which Fluke encounters a badger who shares some of his insight and speculation on the reincarnation process.
• While, most of the human characters' names have been changed, Carol's name remains the same in both versions.
• The character of Brian is exclusive to the film. In the book Fluke does not have a son, but a daughter named Polly. Polly does not form as tight a bond with Fluke as Brian does in the film. The climatic plot point about Brian being lost in a snowstorm and Fluke having to find him has no such equivalent in the book. I haven't said much about Brian, but he's the character who occasionally threatens to tip the film over from poignancy into mawkishness, particularly toward the end when it dabbles with the idea of him having a psychic connection with Fluke.
• The part about Fluke being reunited with Rumbo in the form of a squirrel does occur in the book, but plays out slightly differently. There, it's implied that Rumbo does not actually recognise Fluke, and the two of them do not become friends again.
• Both the book and the film are narrated from Fluke's perspective, although the book has an additional twist with regards to whom he is telling the story that is not carried over into the film. There, Fluke has been speaking directly to the viewer this entire time, whereas in the book he is revealed to have been telling the story to a dying vagrant who, in his moribund state, is apparently capable of understanding the dog. The book contains a short epilogue, narrated from the third-person perspective, regarding the fate of the vagrant once Fluke leaves him: "He died. And he waited."

Finally, I mentioned earlier that I have a weakness for stories about reincarnation. I suppose this can be attributed in part to my deep personal attachment to a pet species with a painfully short lifespan. When you're a rat owner for the long haul, you experience loss and having to start over so many times that it's helpful to think of this cycle, in its way, as the continuation of one universal life. The upside is that you get to frequently experience the joy of a new beginning, albeit with the paradox that you are, inevitably, setting yourself up to have your heart broken all over again. The story that I think perfectly encapsulates the darker side of the process? Stephen King's Pet Sematary. You're bringing something back from the dead, so that ultimately it can stab you in the eye.

Casper (1995): All of Harvey's Friends Are Dead, But That's Okay

Since I broached the subject about a month ago, let's talk about the time that Casper, that unusually benevolent, pint-sized wraith who'd previously starred in a series of theatrical cartoons from Famous Studios in the 1940s and 1950s, and later a series of comics by Harvey Comics, received his own big screen feature adventure, courtesy of Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, Steven Spielberg's production company. Casper was directed by Brad Silberling and released on May 26th 1995, at a time when computer-generated effects were beginning to gain more of a commanding presence in cinema - we were only a few months away from the release of Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film, and for now Casper represented a major breakthrough all of its own, in boasting the first leading character to be created entirely with CGI and integrated into live action settings with flesh and blood co-stars. The beginning of the end, you might even say? Much as Casper is a misunderstood ghoul, I think Casper is a misunderstood flick, one that's easily dismissed as being little more than a playground for its flashy visual effects but has quite a bit more going for it than that.

Our story opens with Carrigan Crittenden (Cathy Moriarty), a gold-digging would-be socialite who is chagrined to discover that her late father has left all of his fortune to various wildlife charities and all she got from the deal is Whipstaff Manor, a condemned seafront property in the town of Friendship, Maine. She has a change of heart, however, when her long-suffering personal assistant Dibs (Eric Idle) discovers a hidden document in with the deeds, indicating that Whipstaff Manor actually harbours a secret wealth. Accessing the property proves to be another matter entirely, for while long devoid of human life, Carrigan hadn't banked on it being haunted by four ghosts. Casper (voice of Malachi Pearson), the ghost of a 12-year-old child, is the lonely misfit of the household, and is constantly bullied and subjugated by the other three, a malevolent poltergeist posse known as the Ghostly Trio (whom Casper identifies as his "uncles", although their living identities are not expounded on further). Heading the trio is the spindly snarker Stretch (Joe Nipote), who is the meanest and most intelligent of the three - there's also Fatso (Brad Garrett), an obtuse glutton, and Stinkie (Joe Alaskey), a vulgar prankster. Barely tolerated by his fellow specter, except as a dogsbody, Casper has an innate curiosity about reconnecting with the living, but finds little sympathy there either, for most people become shrieking wrecks at the mere sight of him. When Carrigan and Dibs show up at the manor, Casper tries to befriend them and gets the classic reaction; worse still, they attract the attentions of the three poltergeists, who really give them something to scream about. Carrigan enlists various forces to rid the manor of the ghosts, but to no avail - after burning through the best (cue clever cameos from Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci and Dan Aykroyd as Ray Stantz), she turns to the rest, and finds Dr James Harvey (Bill Pullman) a parapsychologist and self-proclaimed "ghost therapist", who purports to be able to convince ghosts to stop haunting by directing them through their "unfinished business". Harvey's commitment to his work has rendered him a pariah both professionally and socially, not least because his obsession with helping ghosts move on from whatever's pinning them to this mortal coil is very transparently rooted in his own inability to let go of his deceased wife, Amelia. This ostracisation has spread to his teenage daughter Kat (Christina Ricci), a girl without a friend in the world, in whom Casper may finally have found a kindred spirit.

I was ten years old when Casper first hit. I went to see it and was as blown away by it as any film I had ever seen back then. I dug the visual effects, I found many of the individual sequences to be tremendously exciting (particularly the sequence where Harvey faces off against the Ghostly Trio), I got a little tearful during all the third-act pathos, and I give extra special props to the lady in the seat behind me who gasped indignantly at the part where Carrigan looms over Dibs and yells, "THE BITCH IS BACK!" It's a very memorable experience from my early days of cinema-going. I held such fond, loving memories of this film that I was slightly taken back, some years later, to discover that Casper is not exactly what you'd call a universally beloved flick, with many being inclined to regulate it to the same junkyard of trash 1990s live action cartoon recreations as Richie Rich and The Flintstones (there was a time when The Addams Family and The Addams Family Values used to be cast on that pile, but people have decided that they like those movies after all). As with Benji The Hunted, it's a case of this film's fanbase consisting predominantly of myself and Roger Ebert. For as little respect as this film is afforded, every time I revisit it I am reminded of why I loved it so much as a child and have the living snot disarmed out of me all over again. Firstly, the visual effects have stood the test of time - some of the CGI might seem a tad rudimentary to modern eyes (naturally, the ghosts based on cartoon characters look a whole lot better than those based on real people), but Casper and the Trio are still all so fantastically fluid and expressive in their individual movements and mannerisms, and, as with Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it's a film that benefits immeasurably from the sheer believability with which the ghosts and humans appear to interact. More importantly, the film has heart, although for me personally that heart lies less in whether Casper and Kat will overcome their social and physical differences than it does in Harvey's whole arc, his quest for reaffirmation and the unexpected solidarity he discovers in the Ghostly Trio. Bill Pullman, I think, is wonderful in this film - god knows, I wasn't a fan of that other special effects blitz he was in around the middle of the decade, but here he's truly adorable as Harvey, a socially paralysed dork whose earnest demeanor barely conceals the deep existential despair underpinning his day-to-day being. Some find Moriarty's performance as Carrigan to be overly theatrical (no doubt that she's trying to out-cartoon the cartoon ghosts), but I think she's a fun and underrated villain with some good dialogue.

Having said all that, I can understand why some people would struggle with this film. It is rather a peculiar mishmash of elements - a goofball special effects extravaganza with conspicuously morbid undertones, and a whole lot of touchy-feels. It's a silly live action cartoon that strives to be a little dark and dirty (but isn't a dark comedy, despite its occasionally flippant approach to to the issues it raises) and ultimately wants to say something meaningful about life and death, love and loss, grief and letting go. The end result is film dealing explicitly with grave subject matter that flitters through such a dizzying variety of tones - zany, sentimental, and at times a mite mean-spirited - that as a concoction it becomes somewhat grotesque, and I think that's what alienates some viewers. Personally, I suspect the film's offbeat style and its upfront grappling with the issue of mortality - not least, the mortality of its target audience - has an awful lot to do with what endeared it to me as a kid, but I appreciate why some might find its discordant treatment of the subject off-putting.

Among the film's detractors were our friends at Halliwell's Film Guide, who praised the "spectacular" visual effects but found the film "tasteless in its attitudes to life and death". I've pondered what, specifically, would stand out as so tasteless about it, and I will confess that as fervidly as I'll defend this movie, there is one aspect of it that I do not like, and which has never sat well with me, and that is the entire manner in which Carrigan's arc is resolved. See (SPOILERS!), Harvey's hypothesis that ghosts are bound to the living world by some kind of "unfinished business" turns out to be entirely astute. Most ghosts are held captive by an unfortunate paradox, whereby they are driven by a strong sense of purpose but fated to lose all conscious awareness of who they were, somewhat impeding their ability to fulfill that purpose; should a ghost actually complete their unfinished business, however, they will "cross over" into the afterlife, from which ordinarily they cannot return. With Kat's help, Casper remembers that in life he was the son of a renowned inventor named McFadden, and between them they uncover the "Lazarus", a project that McFadden had been working on following the death of his son, with the power to restore a ghost to a life, but was never able to utilise due to his being declared insane and presumably dying in an institution somewhere. Casper and Kat manage to activate the Lazarus, but discover that, due to the limited quantities of life-giving fluid, the machine only has the capacity to be used once. Meanwhile, the poltergeists have gone out for a wild night on the town, taking Harvey with them, and Carrigan and Dibs seize the opportunity to infiltrate the manor, but are unable to access the vault reputed to contain the treasure. However, they stumble across the Lazarus and, learning of its capabilities, Carrigan steals the fluid, musing that it would be so much easier to break into the vault if one of them were a ghost and had the ability to float through walls. She then attempts to murder Dibs, promising to later restore him to life using the Lazarus, only to get herself killed in the effort. So she becomes a ghost and uses her newly-acquired spectral powers to crack the vault and seize the chest of treasure within, much to the protests of Casper and Kat. Dibs shows up and attempts to betray Carrigan, intending to keep the treasure for himself and leave her permanently stranded as a ghost - she responds by punching him and sending him flying through the window of the manor, presumably to his death. Kat and Casper then quiz Carrigan on what her unfinished business is. Carrigan triumphantly declares that she has none, now that she finally has what she came here for...whereupon her spirit is hijacked by an overpowering light that proceeds to obliterate her. Realising her error, Carrigan desperately pleads that she has plenty of unfinished business, but it's too late - the powers that be clearly heard her, and there are no take backs.

With Carrigan gone, Casper and Kat reclaim both the fluid and the chest, and we get our payoff to the whole treasure saga, which is that - PSYCH! - there was no treasure. Turns out, that hidden message on the deeds all boiled down to a gigantic misunderstanding. It was simply a leftover prop from a role-playing game that McFadden used to play with Casper. And what was actually in that treasure chest? A worthless baseball. Well, not entirely worthless, in that it holds tremendous sentimental value to Casper: "It's autographed by Duke Snider of the Brooklyn Dodgers! My favourite player!" That, folks, is our punchline.

So yes, we were in textbook MacGuffin territory all along with this whole treasure business, in that the treasure itself (or lack of) has no actual bearing on any of the plot resolution, and is there purely to give Carrigan her motivation for doing all that she does. The revelation that she got her panties in such an ungodly twist over a meagre baseball is clearly intended to be humorous, but falls flat - not so much because it's a weak punchline to such a pivotal arc, but because it seems like awfully flippant payoff in light of the fact that two people just lost their lives in pursuit of this non-existent treasure. (Technically, Dibs' fate is unknown - it's possible that he survived, although I can't say I'm loving his odds.) On that note, Casper and Kat deliberately goaded Carriagn into professing that she has no unfinished business, knowing full well what would happen if she did, so...arguably, you could say that they murdered her. Perhaps "murder" is a concept that only applies to corporeal beings, but at any rate they destroyed her ghost, and seem quite remorseless about the entire affair. And over what? A baseball signed by Duke Snider. (Okay, the fluid as well, but I'm still not comfortable with the fact that this was still a major factor in what such a dramatic life and death struggle came down to.)

I get the intention, of course. Carrigan and Dibs were victims of their own avarice, obsessiveness and superficiality. The whole purpose of the alleged treasure turning out to be something as inconsequential as a baseball (even one autographed by Duke Snider) is to make a point about how ridiculous and misspent those aspirations were from the start. Casper pushes the argument, with all the cold-blooded ferocity of the Coen brothers' Fargo (1996), that the pursuit of personal and material gain will inevitably coax out the mindless, self-destructive monsters in us all, a struggle that in the end is absolutely not worth the bloodshed. For the treasure to be a beloved personal item of Casper's, and the map part of a bonding ritual he once shared with his father, likewise provides a clear contrast of values, with Carrigan's grasping rapacity playing off against Casper's guilelessness. It isn't too much of a stretch to infer that Whipstaff Manor does contain a treasure, but it's not one that Carrigan, who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, can actually use. It's also certainly not that stupid baseball. It would be easy enough to argue that the actual treasure lay in love and friendship, but I would go a step further and suggest that the real treasure to be unearthed at Whipstaff Manor is life itself. After all, we have the Lazarus, and that is a pretty remarkable find. Another reason, I suppose, why Halliwell's might find the film's outlook on life and death "tasteless" is the entire plot point of the Lazarus. We have a machine that can subvert the natural order and bring the dead back to life, and while the film does take a dim view on those who would abuse such a device for nefarious purposes, no one questions the broader ethical ramifications of McFadden's god-playing aspirations. But then the purposes of the Lazarus are largely symbolic. This is a film about a ghost who's been dead and lost for some time and who, through his experiences at the manor, finds a renewed purpose and, with the restoration of his life, a better understanding of how to live it. All of that does indeed apply to Casper, but it applies doubly to Harvey who, as I've already indicated, has the most compelling arc out of the cast. What you need to bear in mind about Harvey is that he is already dead before the movie begins - he is not a ghost in the literal sense (although he does become one later on in the film), but he exists as a figurative ghost, one who has become disconnected from life because he is so heavily fixated with holding on to the past. Harvey is unprepared to confront the future until he feels he has been reconciled with what fate has forced him to leave behind; over the course of the film, however, he gains a new perspective, one that enables him to see a way through his grief and insecurity (ultimately it is Harvey, and not Casper, who is restored to life via the Lazarus), and rejoins the living, through the acceptance he finds among the dead. The treasure at the manor, then, is the possibility of a brand new dawn, of new hope and momentum following loss.

It's easy enough to draw parallels between Carrigan's fanatical pursuit of the phantom treasure and Harvey's relentless quest to be reunited with Amelia, whom he doggedly believes to still be out there in the form of a ghost. In both cases, we have characters who are clearly damaging themselves for the sake of something they suppose to be there on the basis of only conjecture and assumption. But the most compelling analogue for Carrigan's disturbing final demise lies with Casper himself. For he, like Carrigan, was cut down at the height of his exaltation, and by his own steadfast refusal to relinquish personal acquisition. His memories of his past life finally restored, Casper recounts to Kat how he became a ghost - he had begged his father to buy him a sled, and when his father relented, Casper was so delighted that he went out into the snowy landscape and played with it to a dangerous degree: "I couldn't stop, I was having so much fun. Then it got late, it got dark, it got cold. And I got sick. My dad got sad." The whole notion of a sled embodying the tipping point between a lost innocence and an altogether more tumultuous twist of fate is of course evocative of Orson Welles' much-admired classic Citizen Kane (1941), to an extent that I presume can only be deliberate. Whereas Kane's final gasp on his deathbed was a lament for the childhood sled he regretted leaving behind on the road to power and success (that is, a yearning for the simpler, gentler life he could otherwise have led), Casper's downfall came in his unwillingness to be parted from his own beloved sled. Casper wished to remain where he was, in that moment of carefree happiness for all eternity, oblivious to the fact that the world around him was already changing. Casper aspired to freeze time, and himself became frozen, literally and figuratively, forever stranded in spiritual limbo in the form of a living impaired twelve-year-old. Casper's grasping comes from a more innocent place than Carrigan's, but both were ultimately misdirected by the assumption that everything they would ever need was right there in their hands, and that all they had to do was to keep a hold of it. The message, in both cases, is that anyone who tries to grab hold of life and bend it to their will does so to their own detriment.

A common connection linking Casper's predicament to all of the main humans is the sensation that life is something that is out there and is passing them by. Carrigan believes that she could be living the high life if she could just get her hands on the treasure inside the manor. Kat, having been forced to relocate so many times owing to her father's nomadic lifestyle, has never had the opportunity to settle within any one community and form any real connections or a sense of belonging; she is a kindred spirit to Casper because she, like film, feels afloat, an empty shell without an identity or any firm relationship with the past, the present or the future. Kat, unlike her father, aspires to move on from their family's tragedy, but feels guilt in doing so; at one point, she discloses to Casper her fear that she is starting to forget her mother. And finally we have Harvey, who is the most living impaired of them all, having died a clear emotional death with the literal death of Amelia. Harvey has become a ghost, not unlike the ones he professes to be helping, driven to walk the Earth by an unfinished business that he has no means of ever fulfilling. When Kat challenges her father on his unrelenting conviction that Amelia is now a ghost, he insists that, "She is, she has unfinished business," without articulating what that business might be exactly, making it painfully evident that he projects his own lack of resolution and devastation at having had his marital bliss cut short onto his deceased wife. Harvey spends his present pining for the past and mourning the cancelled future, all while attempting to avoid facing up to the abyss of uncertainty that lies ahead. Harvey, like Kat, has lost his connection to the wider world; on the journey up to Friendship he makes it clear just how devoid his own life is of friends. His relationship with his daughter represents his only strong and stable association with another human being, and Harvey is all-too aware that Kat is already a teenager and beginning to move in her own direction. Kat will grow and change and Harvey, who feels unable to progress, understands that the time will come when he inevitably will be left behind. Harvey does not attempt to stop Kat from growing - as a character, he simply doesn't exude that level of authority. His reaction to Kat's incoming puberty is one more of disconcertment and deflated powerlessness. He permits Kat to hold a Halloween party in the manor for her new classmates and to make plans to bring a date, but the knowledge that Kat's attentions are shifting toward the outside world, coupled with his weariness at being unable to fix the manor's ghost problem, pushes him into a state of deep despondence, or what the Ghostly Trio refer to as a "fleshie breakdown."

Harvey forges a re-connection with life, ironically, through his connection with three dead guys. The Ghostly Trio begrudgingly allow Harvey to remain at the manor after he defeats them in a confrontation, but are largely unreceptive to his efforts to counsel the scaring tendencies out of them. However, when the poltergeists learn of Harvey's longing to be reunited with Amelia, Stretch makes him a proposition - they will help him find Amelia if he agrees to convince Carrigan to leave them alone. Harvey agrees, but at first it's not clear if either party intends to uphold their side of the bargain, particularly as the Trio immediately seize the opportunity to play a cruel prank on Harvey. Nevertheless, as time goes by the poltergeists grow to feel a genuine affinity for Harvey, who in turn begins to admire the camaraderie between the Trio, their zest for their afterlife, and their ability to exist unburdened by either the pains of the past or the fear of the future. They are not concerned that life is out there and is passing them by, for as they see it, life is something that is severely oversold. As Harvey observes, "You say, I'm a ghost. You look life in the face and say, I don't need you!" As a result, he revises his previously-held view that ghosts are inherently out of place in the land of the living. To be a ghost is to exist without resolution, and Harvey comes to see that as indicative not necessarily of a disordered despairing, but of a tremendous adaptability. It is the ability to keep enduring, long after the world has written you off as past your expiry date. The poltergeists become his salvation, but this in itself nearly takes a dark turn, when the Trio, having extended their esprit de corps to Harvey, conspire to kill him so that he can truly become one of them, reasoning that they would be doing him a favour by putting him out of his misery. They are unable to go through with this, however, when Harvey tells them how much their acceptance means to him and announces his intention to defend their right to continue haunting the manor, and it dawns on the Trio that murdering the only fleshie willing to accept them as they are would be a heinous thing to do. (This is another reason why you will never convince me that this isn't one of the greatest family movies of all-time - we reach a point in the narrative where we get a sequence dedicated to an explicit display of heartfelt love between a man and three malevolent spirits, which is exactly the kind of mind-blowing awesomeness that made my own ten-year-old spirit soar.)

The Trio considers subjecting Harvey to a brutal initiation ceremony.

Unfortunately, Harvey meets with an accident on his bender with the poltergeists, falls into an open trench and dies anyway. His moment of death is, somewhat gallingly, played entirely for laughs, although there is great pathos later on when Kat encounters him as a ghost and realises that he has already forgotten her, thus turning the tables in their relationship dynamic. Now, Kat is the one in danger of being left behind. Some might feel there is a slight discrepancy here, as Harvey seems to forget about his past life as soon as he becomes a ghost, whereas Carrigan clearly remembered what she was doing within the brief time she had. You could chalk that up, if you so chose, to the respective mindsets of the characters when they died (since Carrigan was very determined, and fixated on the prospect of becoming a ghost in order to infiltrate the vault, even if she intended for the experience to be Dibs', whereas Harvey was in an intoxicated state and fairly oblivious), but from a thematic perspective I would argue that Harvey's amnesia works primarily as a means of illustrating his personal dilemma. For Harvey, there is immense attraction in being a ghost, and in the ability to shed all conscious awareness of the life he leaves behind - upon surveying his new spectral form, he declares, "I'm free! I've never felt so good in my life." It offers Harvey a release from his grief, and the opportunity to discard all traces of his former identity and no longer be burdened (at least knowingly) by any of the personal attachments or obligations he held during life, dulling him to the hurt of anything that might have come before, or may have threatened to happen in the future - as Casper had earlier mused, "When you're a ghost, life doesn't matter that much any more." This freedom from his personal demons has, however, come at an obvious cost to Harvey, in that it also means having to sever himself from everything that once gave his life fulfillment and meaning. And yet, in the end his bond with Kat proves too powerful, and he discovers that he cannot follow his poltergeist friends all the way down to the hedonistic line. Kat gestures to him with her pinky, replicating the "pinky swear" that she and Harvey had made earlier in the film and reminding Harvey of their physical and emotional connection. At this point, Harvey gains an awareness of his situation, and is devastated on realising the barrier that has been driven between himself and Kat. Casper comes to the rescue, and allows Harvey to take his place within the Lazarus, even if it means forfeiting his only prospect of ever again becoming one of the living.

Harvey is literally restored to life via the Lazarus, but his resurrection also signifies his coming alive for the very first time in the film, in that he has finally figured out how to move forward while grappling with feelings of grief and uncertainty. If to be a ghost is to exist without resolution, then to be alive is to live with impermanence, and Harvey realises that both are vital qualities in order to navigate in a world where the past and the future alike are so ill-defined. He emerges with a fortified commitment toward Kat, understanding the importance of always being there for her, even as she continues to move in her own direction - this much is evident in his encouraging her to join the Halloween party as he stands back and lingers upon the sidelines. This reaffirmation of his parental responsibilities does not, however, negate the lessons he learned from his experiences with the poltergeists - thanks to the Trio, he has a renewed sense of belonging and a greater resilience to the capriciousness of life. He is truly a man who has learned how to live with the specter of mortality hanging over him. Unlike the ghosts, he is not able to look life in the eye and declare that he does not need it - his obligation to Kat keeps him grounded, and willing to weather life's heartbreaks for her sake - but he does end up rejecting the ideal of a pristine, perfectly tied-up life, which he assumed had been lost with Amelia but likely never existed in the first place. As we learned from Casper's sorry backstory, life is not for the grabbing, pinning down and safe containing, and anyone who strives for such an existence would be as misguided and bound for destruction as Carrigan over that fictitious treasure. Harvey understands that in order to carry on he must be prepared to live with the holes that can never be filled, the cracks that will always be visible and the questions that may never be answered. Crucially, he remains present for his daughter but retains his friendship with the Trio, indicating that he now has his own individual new path ahead of him, in addition to backing up his daughter as she sets off down her own.

Of course, Harvey does get resolution, of sorts, when Amelia (Amy Brenneman) shows up at the end of the film, having been summoned by the Ghostly Trio, who let her know that Harvey was searching for her (thus fulfilling their end of the bargain and demonstrating that they they are truly Harvey's friends), although she does so largely to call Harvey out for projecting his own feelings of deficiency onto her ("I have no unfinished business. Please don't let me be yours.") She appears not as a ghost, as Harvey had always anticipated, but as an angel (Stinkie had effectively told Harvey this much earlier on, when he said of Amelia, "she's always been an angel to me"). I'd note that, for the most part, the film tries to avoid explicitly aligning itself with any specific branch of religiosity, hence why it remains so vague on the issue of what afterlife the ghosts actually "cross over" into, but making Amelia into an angel is something of a necessary evil in order to clearly illustrate that she's transcended the worldly attachments and appetites that keep both the ghosts and humans tethered to the living world.* Amelia does not yearn for anything more from life, because she feels that she already experienced the best it had to offer within the time she had, however truncated. We also need to account for Amelia's Blue Fairy-esque ability to turn Casper into a living boy; in gratitude for his willingness to put her family's needs above his own, Amelia grants him his wish, albeit with a major limitation - she can restore Casper to life, but only for a single evening. Casper accepts this arrangement, and takes the opportunity to join the Halloween party downstairs and share a dance and ultimately a kiss with Kat (in his living form, Casper is played by a young Devon Sawa, who is very effective in the role, in that he does emit this distinctly spooky, otherworldly quality). Compared to his previous rapacity over the sled, Casper now appreciates that the defining quality of life is its impermanence - ultimately, all things must pass, and all he can do is go forth and take advantage of the time that he has. Meanwhile, Amelia reinforces to Harvey the necessity of living with uncertainty - when he admits that he doesn't know what he's doing, she responds, "What parent does?"

This being a 90s Hollywood blockbuster, Casper ends, inevitably, with the reaffirmation of the traditional family unit. Harvey may be a single father tasked with raising a teenage daughter by his lonesome, but Amelia assures him that she'll still have a part in this, as she'll be watching over them all the while; furthermore, she tells him that the time will come when they'll all be together again, indicating that their marital and familial bonds will ultimately endure, the restoration of the family guaranteed as the restoration of an intrinsic cosmic order. (Actually, in spite of Amelia's parting remarks, I like to think that when Harvey dies for the second time he'll stick around with his friends the Ghostly Trio and fulfill his obvious destiny to make them into the Ghostly Quartet - they're the ones we've spent the entire movie watching him get close to, after all.) The final scene, however, shows Kat and Harvey at the abandoned Halloween party, once again deserted by the outside world,  as they privately continue the celebration with Casper and the Ghostly Trio, the six of them now all functioning together as the world's most unconventional family. The closing image, then, is one of unity among pariahs, social outcasts who are all quite happy and comfortable with themselves because they have one another's affirmation. The issues are not entirely cut and dried - the Ghostly Trio may have come through for Harvey, but there is nothing, beyond that final image of unity, to indicate that their relationship with their nephew has improved (Casper and the Trio actually interact surprisingly infrequently throughout the film, for they are each so tied up in Kat and Harvey's respective narrative strands). Moreover, there is an unspoken sadness in the implication that the dance and the kiss that Casper was able to share with Kat constitute the full extent to which their puppy love is ever likely to go. For as long as he remains a ghost, Casper is doomed to stay twelve years old forever, while Kat, as Harvey and Amelia jointly acknowledge, is already a teenager, and the gap between them is only going to widen as time goes on and Kat progresses ever deeper into puberty. Eventually Casper, like Harvey, will have to deal with the inevitability of Kat moving on and leaving him behind. But then that's for the future to bear out. All we have now is the present.

Here are a few of my more random observations:

• The Lazarus worked, I assume, by using that "primordial soup mix" to recreate Harvey's body from scratch. In which case, his old body is presumably still out there, lying at the bottom of that trench in a bloodied, mangled state? That's a grim thought.
• On the subject of bodies, if we're to assume that Dibs did indeed bite the dust when Carrigan sent him hurtling through the window (and we have every reason to believe he did), then presumably his dead body is still lying right there outside the manor while all those kids are inside partying? Again, grim. The first teens to sneak out into the grounds for a quick spliff are in for the shock of their lives, never mind one of the dancers morphing into a ghost before their eyes.
• Aside from the whole business with Carrigan and the baseball, there's only one other notable nitpick I have (well, actually two - Ben Stein irritates the hell out of me, and I'd sooner he wasn't in this movie at all, but he's only there for about a minute and we get his part out of the way nice and early, so I suppose I can deal with it). That's that Fatso somehow knows Harvey's name during the "Three Musketeers" portion of their confrontation, before he formally announces it to Stretch during their plunger/golf club clash. Now, the Trio had already had that moment where they possess Harvey by crawling inside his head and warping his self-perception (a light-hearted nod to that horrendous face-peeling sequence from the movie Poltergeist), so you could argue that they'd gleaned some personal information from within his mind. All the same, it does somewhat undermine the impact of Harvey's triumphant response when Stretch challenges him as to who he thinks he is: "Dr James Harvey, your therapist!"
• Let's touch briefly on a pet peeve of mine about 1990s cinema in general - the theme songs. While it had long been commonplace for Hollywood movies to come with their own tie-in pop numbers (that way, you could have a hit single on the side and promote further awareness of your picture - synergy, people!), I think it was around the time of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves onward that we started to see a trend wherein all Hollywood theme songs became arbitrary power ballads that were only very tenuously linked to the content of the movie itself. Gone were the days when a theme song actually bore the name of the movie in the title and was very clearly, unambiguously about the movie in question (eg: "Ben" by Michael Jackson, and "Pet Sematary" by Ramones, which may have been one of the last of its kind). The problem with these 90s theme songs is that they were, in most cases, entirely interchangeable - you could swap the theme songs for Con Air, Up Close And Personal and Armageddon and they all would all make every bit as much sense. Casper was no exception, with "Remember Me This Way" by Jordan Hill filling in the honors. This one at least ties in with the film's key theme about learning to let go and accept impermanence; obviously, the lyrics apply to Harvey and Amelia, but I suppose they also encapsulate Casper's awareness that he can't actually accompany Kat on her journey through adolescence. Nowadays, movies seldom get original theme songs at all - why create something new, when you can play to the nostalgia crowd by pulling out something familiar and retro? - so against my better judgement I find myself becoming wistful for the days when we had all these music videos consisting of a singer standing around idly while a bunch of clips from the movie played.

Finally, Casper never got a proper sequel. One was apparently scripted, and the film was certainly enough of a box office success to have justified it, only instead they decided to go the DTV prequel route, and plans for a theatrical sequel ultimately fizzled. It did, however, get a spin-off animated series, The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper (as was also standard procedure in the 1990s), which served as a direct sequel to the movie. If I do say so it was pretty damned excellent; in fact, it might even get my vote for most underrated animated series of the 90s. If you don't believe me, then I'd advise you to check out "Three Ghosts and a Baby", which is the episode where Harvey accidentally hypnotises Casper into reverting to an infantile state and the Ghostly Trio end up having to care for him. Trust me when I say that you're in for the funniest eight minutes of your life.


* In a way it also acts as a nice segue into Silberling's following film, City of Angels (1998), a remake of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1987), which reexamined the issue of mortality, this time from an angelic perspective.