I wanted to love this so much. Little Aussie girl, imaginary friends? Check. And it is at turns pretty interesting. A little like the office co-workers in Lars and the Real Girl having a “weird doll thing” of their own, this movie picks out the people in Kellyanne’s tight-knit community whose behaviour is really just as quirky as her insistence on the existence of the invisible Pobby and Dingan. You see her brother shake his head at their dad dowsing for a good spot to dig for opals the same way as he shakes his head at her when she speaks of her friends. There’s a guy who’s cut a copy of an invite to Princess Diana’s funeral out of the paper, “stuck it down on cardboard, put it in a frame, tourists love it.” Indeed the whole place is there for this “opal dream” that will only come true for a select enough few to make it no less ridiculous a pursuit than anything a child can come up with.

So it’s not without depth, that’s for sure. But at 85 minutes, it’s surprising, even infuriating, how much of it feels unnecessary. There’s a lot, or what feels like a lot, of people running or riding bikes around in the dark looking for Pobby and Dingan and not really getting anywhere. There’s a lot of the girl just looking a little pallid like Elliot in ET when his pal appears to be dying. It’s a dire comparison and I hate myself for making it, but there just aren’t that many imaginary friends movies lol so I’m forced: I’d still rather be watching Drop Dead Fred, to be honest, even though this movie is much closer to the aforementioned Lars and the Real Girl, almost, the more I think about it, eerily so … and though that was certainly the better movie … I cried a helluva a lot more at the end of this one.

God I love this movie. And, not unlike Fred himself in the movie, it just kind of found me tonight while I was channel hopping, years since I last saw it, just about exactly when I needed it most. This is one of my favourite movies ever, and I’m never gonna let myself forget about it for as long as I had before today ever again. There’s just so many stupid little things in it that I find utterly beautiful – like when Fred’s reading the illegible note Lizzie wrote him as a child when he “left”, when her mother took him away, and he can read every single word of it, even pointing at one Crayola scribble and pointing syllable by syllable, “See it says here – P-ROM-ISE!”; just, like, basically, every scene between Fred and Lizzie, young or old, there’s just so much going on, even when he’s being completely stupid and inane, they’re just so perfect together, the film makers just create that imaginary friend feeling like I think no one else ever has managed onscreen.

I mean, come to think of it – are there many other imaginary friend movies . . . if any? Glancing at the keyword section of the IMDb, the closest I can find that I’ve seen are things like Pete’s Dragon, and I haven’t seen Harvey but that of course sounds fairly close. Still, this one really seems to me to capture the whole big childhood aspect of the whole thing – what an imaginary friend really means, etc, yes, sorry, but I actually really find depths in this movie that I feel like no one else seems to, lol.

Phoebe Cates is brilliant, transforming almost completely into a little girl before our eyes at certain moments when Fred really gets to her and wakens the impish pre-teen in her again. Rik Mayall as Fred – when I think of Mayall, the major roles of his that come to mind are, of course, Rik from The Young Ones, and Richie from Bottom … maybe Alan B’stard even though I barely watched The New Statesman, and his Herod in the video version of Jesus Christ Superstar was pretty brilliant, too – but Drop Dead Fred is way up with those first two. And, yes, it’s mostly him playing his Young Ones character yet again … but there’s also, as I said, some really heartwarming moments in this one, like when he tells the young Lizzie, sitting up in the tree after playing robbers, never to be like her mother; and at the end, the way he looks at her cuddling her younger self, that look that knows he has to leave her again. I’m not ashamed to say, that scene makes me cry every time.

Some people seem to get immediately turned off by the childish humour of the movie – like, even without pointing out, that, d’uh, it’s the guy from The Young Ones, what do you expect … it’s about a little girl’s imaginary friend, d’uh, what do you expect!? Childish humour is practically the point of the movie! If your face doesn’t light up when Mayall first appears and yells, “Hello, snotface!” you might as well turn it off, lol.

BTW, pointless factoid I’ve probably never mentioned here on my site, possibly not even to many people who know me read this, lol, which might make more sense of my review and my opinion of the movie – I had like a dozen little imaginary friends. They had no names, or I don’t remember them (eek, better stop that train of thought, maybe if I remember their names they’ll come back! lol) They’d talk to me in the toilet. They were never as wild as Fred, though. Like, if I try to remember the things they talked to me about, all I can hear is this indecipherable chipmunky babble – I’m sure, like the child-scrawl note in the movie, it made perfect sense at the time; but to me now, nada, they could’ve been planning a war or starting a religion for all I know. I probably just told them what was going on in the day, like you would a pet or whatever. But anyway, that’s just yet another reason why I should rename this place TMI, lol. But I mention it ‘cos maybe it explains why I get this movie so much and why some people just can’t get past the … Rik Mayall-ish-ness, for want of a better term.

The only thing that disappointed me on this viewing, and I think I had the same problem last time … the music is never as good as I remember it. I remember the music that plays in the boat scene being way more … well, way less cheesy than it is, I mean so much so that I’m convinced it’s been changed somewhere along the line. Anyway, the music along with the dodgy early 90s visual effects are about the only serious criticisms I’ll allow of the movie. But the rest of it so makes up for it. People have gotta stop giving this movie such a hard time because it’s frequently simply beautiful.

I’ll have to grab this on DVD some time since the cut I saw today (on Disney’s own UK channel Cinemagic, for shame) was one of the ridiculously shortened cuts with over half an hour missing. If this includes the song “Candle on the Water” then it’s downright criminal – was this song sung in the movie, anyone? It certainly wasn’t in this cut anyway, brings new meaning to the word “butchered” if it’s supposed to be there, lol.

Anyway.

I’ve almost certainly seen this movie before, but probably before my longterm memory kicked in. That this movie’s story is so beautiful, and young Sean Marshall’s performance so brilliant, that it overcomes the deficiencies in the live-action/animation combo effects is really saying something. The songs are fantastic, instantly bring a smile and a tear to my face. And what a supporting cast with Shelley Winters and Mickey Rooney on the sidelines.

Make this one of the first movies your kids see before they become too jaded to forgive the visuals. Or just curl up with a cuddly toy and hot chocolate and be a kid yourself again for a couple of hours. Double bill it with The Iron Giant.

Addendum: Should’ve looked here first, but anyway, the movie’s page on Wikipedia contains info on the different cuts, and “Candle on the Water” was indeed cut for the shorter versions. I’ve really never gone with the idea of Disney as an Evil Empire … but this is seriously seriously wrong Make sure you get the right cut when you watch it … I’m gonna be getting the DVD ASAP and probably giving it 5 stars ‘cos even in this wrecked form it perked my mood immeasurably.