CASPER THE FRIENDLY CORPSE

By RICHARD CORLISS

Amid the latest hoo-ha and brouhaha about toxic culture, a media maven is led to wonder: Has Bob Dole ever read his kids a fairy tale? Or sung a nursery rhyme? Or seen a classic Disney cartoon? In Hansel and Gretel, Jack and Jill, Bambi and Dumbo, the obsessive themes are death and dismemberment. These graphic horror stories tell toddlers that life is a dark forest where parents get killed and kids get eaten. As purveyors of Dole's "nightmares of depravity," Warner Bros. ain't a patch on the Grimm Bros.

In its cheerful, knowing way, the hit movie Casper mines this same dark soil. On its face, it is a high-gloss update of the "friendly ghost" who starred in 55 cartoons between 1946 and 1959, a long-running comic book and a short-lived 1979 TV series. Director Brad Silberling mixes rude slapstick for the kids with pop-culture cues for their parents, including gag cameos by Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson and Ghostbusters' Dan Aykroyd. The movie even has its own theme-park ride, a kind of human car wash. All jolly enough. But in its haunted heart, Casper is another invitation to kids to flirt with the idea of being dead.

The film, written by Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver, has the cartoons' familiar plot: Casper searches for a friend and finds one in Kat (Christina Ricci), a lonely girl now in residence at sepulchral Whipstaff Manor. Among the contenders for possession of this dark old house, which looks like a tyrant's wedding cake that has started to melt, are a venal heiress (the ripely funny Cathy Moriarty) and her sidekick (Eric Idle); Casper's uncles, three ectoplasmic boors named Stretch, Fatso and Stinkie; and Kat's klutzy dad (crinkly Bill Pullman).

Here's where the Liebestod kicks in. Still grieving for his late wife, Dad has become a "therapist to the dead," vowing to ease their turmoil so they can rest in peace. The sensible Kat is automatically spooky because she is played by Ricci, the Addams Family daughter. With her wide eyes and genius-size forehead, Ricci now officially assumes the mantle of death-driven teen that Winona Ryder once wore so becomingly. She is Casper's perfect human soul mate.

In the expert computer animation by Dennis Muren and his fellow effects wizards at ILM, Casper is cute and pudgy -- a Pillsbury ghost boy. Yet he is also a dead child speaking from an unquiet grave. Poaching on her father's turf, Kat serves as Casper's therapist and helps him remember his life and early death. "What's it like to die?" Kat asks eagerly, and Casper replies, "Like being born-only backwards." Before long, Kat is forced to decide who lives and who dies-her father or her new best friend!

This is the primal theme -- rying to bring the dead back to life- - that has preoccupied Casper's executive producer, Steven Spielberg, in E.T. and Poltergeist, Always and Jurassic Park. The new film is sprightly enough to conceal its subtext from censorious politicians. But children, who dwell in fear at least as much as in innocence, may get the message: that it would be cool, bitchin', totally awesome to join the Dead Kids Society.