The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Directed by Henry Selick
Tired of scaring humans every October 31 with the same old bag of tricks, Jack Skellington, the spindly king of Halloween Town, kidnaps Santa Claus and plans to deliver shrunken heads and other ghoulish gifts to children on Christmas morning. But as Christmas approaches, Jack's rag-doll girlfriend, Sally, tries to foil his misguided plans.
7 connections found
View:
7 films that influenced The Nightmare Before Christmas
What critics say influenced The Nightmare Before Christmas
The overall appearance of this Tim Burton- and Denise Di Novi-produced animated feature has few visual antecedents - Lotte Reiniger’s stop-motion delicacies (pre-eminently The Adventures of Prince Achmed) come to mind and, perhaps, the expressionistic lines of an artist like Edvard Munch.
The film's affectionate trashing of Christmas traditions is conceptually cunning and clever enough to please every generation, making it an unmissable treat that's destined to become as great a yuletide favourite as The Wizard of Oz.
Working with gifted artists and designers, he has made a world here that is as completely new as the worlds we saw for the first time in such films as " Metropolis " (1927), " The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari " or "Star Wars."
The musical numbers have less in common with those of Disney cartoons than with the cult tunes from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, with which “Nightmare” shares an affinity for blending spookiness with offbeat humour.
Advertisement
Burton, a graduate of the Disney factory (he worked on "The Black Cauldron," among many films, and made a memorable short called "Frankenweenie"), fills the movie with unforgettable compositions: Jack's poetic posings against the moon, for one thing, are aesthetically stunning.
Burton fans will be pleased to find included the two legendary, career-launching short films he made while on the Disney payroll: the live-action "Frankenweenie" (30:05) and the animated "Vincent" (5:55).
"The Nightmare Before Christmas" will be shown tonight at 9 and tomorrow at 1:30 P.M. as part of the New York Film Festival, along with Mr. Burton's 1982 "Vincent."
Disc Two includes Burton's short films Frankenweenie (1984) and Vincent (1982).
"Nightmare Before Christmas" is crammed with the daffy, childlike joy and witty effervescence that marked the first, and probably best, picture of Burton's career, the 1983 stop-motion short "Vincent," about a little boy who adored Vincent Price.
Burton, too early in his career to throw his weight around, doesn't necessarily do much to put his own primal stamp on Furst's designs, though there are certainly a great many isolated moments that feel like what the next several years would reveal as Burton's characteristic aesthetic: a forest at nighttime full of spindly trees straight out of The Nightmare Before Christmas , a clown balloon distending and warping grotesquely, the brooding Gothic (there's that word!) shapes of an impossibly tall cathedral.
Burton, whose inventive, delightfully haunted mind put so much zest into "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," "Beetlejuice," "Batman" and "Edward Scissorhands," has done it again.
Nightmare is a wonderfully original and darkly humorous vision from the mind of Tim Burton, director of Batman.
It's clear that this is the direction he would have gone in, if he hadn't gotten sidetracked by huge success with "Beetlejuice" and "Batman."
In place of the inspired, hellzapoppin slapstick of Burton's best movies (Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, the first Batman), Nightmare provides a joyless frenzy of movement.
"Nightmare" is not as dark as "Batman" (particularly its sequel, which also had a seasonal motif).