Yes it’s a Casper short, but hold on because, shock of shocks, this one is actually half decent, or at the least better than just merely watchable. True it starts out much the same way as any other Casper cartoon that I could name, with the friendly spook scaring people unintentionally away and moping about how no-one wants to be friends with him. It is when Casper travels to the moon and the short does a take on Guliver’s Travels that things pick up.

Those with some knowledge of animation history will remember that Famous Studio where once the Fleischer Studios, who of course made a little film called Guliver’s Travels about three decades prior to this short (give or take). So is this short a homage or the result of lazy writers recycling the past? Well throughout its history, Famous Studios did tend to “borrow” elements from their “studios” previous films; which does suggest the later rather than the former.

The main reason that this Casper short works is that is atypical, in the fact that the ghost has little time to do is self-pity act before he decides to ditch Earth in favour of the moon. It’s also got enough strangeness in it to ascend Famous Studio’s usual shortcomings in the story department.

This short was originally created in 3D (though my copy is 2D), which had a (thankfully) brief spell as the theatre top movie type. It was found that animation as it was, found it hard to do much with the extra dimension; hardly a strange problem for a medium like cel-animation, that is predominately flat by default. Still audiences dictated that the 3D fad was over and the silver-screen would revert to flatness for a while more.

The short works well in 2D, although there are some bits which are definitely 3D in how they were thought out. For example one scene has Casper head towards the screen, which probably works better as a 3-dimensional illusion than it does as a 2-dimensional transition. If you didn’t know this was suppose to be viewed in 3D it wouldn’t matter so much. Thankfully Famous Studio’s had good animators and layout artists on board and thus the animation and backgrounds can at least be comparable to the bigger companies.

There aren’t really any gags and to be fair the cartoon isn’t trying to put them in anyway, the only real joke in the whole short being in its title. Instead the short plays fairly straight and avoid the biggest pitfall the studio has; its dependence on formula. I suppose the biggest mercy is that Casper avoids being annoying, mostly cause he doesn’t moan and mope that much.

It’s not the best Casper short; but it is certainly far from the worst or even the general low standards of the usual fare. The experimental nature of it at the time and the more outlandish nature of the cartoon is very welcoming. Overall this is a competent Casper short that is worth a watch.