Halloween Horrors: THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS

TIM BURTON'S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS  (1993)
Directed by Henry Selick
Featuring the Voices of Chris Sarandon, Danny Elfman, Catherine O'Hara, Ken Page, Ed Ivory, Glenn Shadix, William Hickey, Paul Reubens
PG for some scary images.
SCAREmeter: 2.5/10
GOREmeter: 2/10
OVERALL: 3.5 out of 4 stars

I really like THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS.  I don't really understand the immense critical affection it receives though.  It's far from perfect.  It's great entertainment, charming and engaging, but only the style is what stays with you after the movie's over.  Normally, I wouldn't even make such a point of the film's relatively minor flaws, except for the case that no one else seems to be willing.  As I started though, I really like it.  It is a good movie.
The story, reportedly inspired when Tim Burton saw a Halloween display in a shop window partway through being swapped out for a Christmas one, takes place in the "Holiday Worlds," the places where the spirits of holidays reside.  In Halloween Town, a macabre world of ghouls and spooks who create Halloween scares but with only a couple of exceptions are not malicious.  Jack Skellington (Chris Sarandon (singing by Danny Elfman)) is the Pumpkin King, the much-adored figurehead of this world, but even after another successful Halloween, Jack feels empty inside.  After going for a walk in the woods with his ghost dog, Zero, Jack comes upon something he's never seen before: a circle of trees in the middle of the forest, each with a door designed like a holiday symbol.  The most enticing to Jack is the door shaped like a festively-decorated evergreen tree, and upon opening it, he tumbles through a portal to the holiday world of Christmas Town.  Finally finding the satisfaction he desires in this new and exciting holiday, Jack resolves to take it for himself this year.  His intentions are good, but not all that well thought out, and against the warnings of Sally (Catherine O'Hara), the rag doll woman created by a mad scientist, he has Santa Claus (Ed Ivory) kidnapped so he can deliver presents this year.  Things get out of hand though when Halloween Town's morbid twist on Christmas is not so well appreciated by the human world, and Santa winds up in the possession of one of Halloween Town's genuinely nasty denizens, Oogie Boogie (Ken Page), a gambling addict of a bogeyman whose favorite choice of stakes are the lives of others, who he then eats afterward.
Although possibly the film most strongly associated with Tim Burton (BEETLE JUICE makes another strong candidate), NIGHTMARE is not directed by Tim Burton, but rather by stop-motion animation stalwart Henry Selick, as any Burton detractor can tell you (although most of them still like this Burtonesque movie; go figure).  During the 1990s, Burton was one of the most in-demand directors in the industry following low-budget hits PEE WEE HERMAN'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985) and BEETLE JUICE (1988), which led to the monumentally-successful BATMAN (1989), so he was too busy to get involved with the slow and laborious process of a stop-motion animated feature at the time, and he was contractually committed to the BATMAN sequel, BATMAN RETURNS (1992), when production was starting.  So why TIM BURTON'S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS?  Well, beyond the obvious marketing strength of his name at the time, it is still definitely his baby, and Selick is sort of like the midwife/nanny of the process.  The idea first germinated during Burton's early career at Walt Disney Animation, where he worked as a concept artist for a while on films like THE FOX AND THE HOUND (1981) and THE BLACK CAULDRON (1985), but whose work was often dismissed for looking like "roadkill."  Burton branched out onto directing short films, and completed two, VINCENT (1982) and FRANKENWEENIE (1984) (both can be found in the bonus material for NIGHTMARE on Blu-Ray and DVD).  He began developing NIGHTMARE as a short project or possibly a television special around the same time, but following FRANKENWEENIE, Burton was fired because the company believed it was a waste of company resources on a product that was too dark and scary for them to use.  Following his later success however, Burton now had the clout to make the projects he wanted, and one of those was THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, which, having been developed at Disney, was under their copyright.  Naturally, they were quite pleased to welcome back the now highly-marketable talent and make his weird film.
Burton had first written the story as a poem, and he co-wrote the script, but due to his other commitments, could not direct, so instead acted as producer.  This mostly just meant his name, a few resources, and of course, the story foundations and character drawings Burton made during his time at Disney.  Selick, who attended CalArts as one of Burton's peers, and like him, had had an unremarkable career at Disney as an inbetween artist (low-ranking animators who fill in the drawings between the key poses drawn by head animators, in order to create fluid movement) on PETE'S DRAGON (1977) and FOX AND THE HOUND, and as a storyboard artist and concept designer on some of Disney's freakier live-action films that came about during the company's growing pains in the 1980s like WATCHER IN THE WOODS (1980) and RETURN TO OZ (1985).  Selick's task was to make the film to look like Burton's film, which might have been a thankless task, except that Selick's artistic sensibility is not too distant from Burton's, a fact that would not help him in getting recognition even for later films like CORALINE, with which Burton was entirely unrelated, but some casual moviegoers still thought was made by him.  The only really apparent area in which Selick differentiates from Burton in terms of aesthetics is that Selick lacks the deliberate kitsch of Burton, but that is to the movie's betterment for certain.
Still riding high the success of the Academy Award-winning special effects extravaganza, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (1988), Disney encouraged technical brilliance in the film, which had begun development as a stop-motion animation project, a medium chosen to pay to tribute to the Rankin-Bass holiday television specials of the 1960s.  NIGHTMARE was certainly not the first stop-motion animated feature-length film, the first of which were made as far back as the 1930s, and short film even before that, but it can claim responsibility for spurring modern mainstream interest in stop-motion animated films, which had been most popular before in the form of the aforementioned holiday specials.  Unlike those however, NIGHTMARE is finely-crafted, with extensive technical innovation that results in an enormously-satisfying visual experience.  From the very start, an extended tracking shot brings us into the holiday world of Halloween Town, through the jack-o-lantern door and swooping through a graveyard where hand-drawn animated shadows appear on the gravestones and the camera swoops and swings through a totally physical world with a dexterity impossible to live-action filmmaking.  Selick uses such possibilities allowed by the medium, while still painstaking, throughout to create elaborate cinematography that matches the dreamlike quality of the physical designs.  It never chooses simplicity; if it will look good and there's any way it can be done, no matter how impractical, that's the course the film seems to take.  NIGHTMARE was nominated for a single Academy Award in the Best Visual Effects category, but unfortunately had no chance in Hell against JURASSIC PARK the same year, which by introducing photo-realistic CGI rendering created the most revolutionary visual effects since STAR WARS (1977).
A particular area in which the film receives heavy praise that seems overblown are the songs, written by frequent Burton-collaborator, Danny Elfman.  They serve a purpose fine, but claims of brilliant and highly original songwriting are so plainly overblown.  Like all but an extremely exceptional few musical soundtracks out there, some songs hit their marks better than others, with Oogie Boogie's Song, This is Halloween and What's This? pulling up the front in that order, but songs like Jack's Lament furthering the story admirably, but as a song, grinding through exposition in monotony.  The rhymes, again, serving their purposes just fine, are also not quite so ingenious as we've been led to believe, and many of them remind of the sort of things a fourth grader might write in school (maybe I was just an especially brilliant fourth grader though).  Sally's Song is the sort that gets stuck in your head and makes you want to blow your brains out.
Speaking of which, as individual stories, Jack and Sally work great, and at least Sally's interest is established, but it just seems kind of abrupt at the finale, when suddenly they're united in love, without ever really developing towards it.  Sally has a crush, Jack is obsessed with Christmas, she gives him a dead fish and magic alcohol for dinner and he asks her to make his "Sandy Claws" suit, and each acting separately, they go about rescuing the real Santa, but there's nothing mutual until it appears as a fully-blossomed romance.  It doesn't work too well in that area of the story.

The film is one of several examples of pre-PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN  films that were advertised early on as Disney films, but as they neared release, the execs at Disney decided it was unsuitable for their typical family audience and released it under the "Touchstone" brand instead, an alternate label introduced as a way for the company to produce more adult fare.  Nowadays, Touchstone is primarily used when Disney distributes other studios' films, such as 2012's DreamWorks Academy Award-winning LINCOLN, as the company is now perfectly willing to release PG-13-rated films primarily of the action-adventure genre, which makes up the bulk of their business outside of animation.  NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS was, ironically, marketed towards families, but replacing their traditional banner with Touchstone indicated the company's belief that the film was not so family-friendly, namely, that it was too "dark" and "scary."  Maybe it was different back then, but honestly, it's not especially either.  Don't get me wrong, there is much morbidity, including a character who always has an ax stuck into his head and Oogie Boogie is basically a bunch of squirming bugs sewn up in burlap, but it's all extremely cartoonish and for every ounce of darkness, there is an ounce of whimsy.  In comparison to the films Laika Studios makes, like CORALINE and PARNORMAN, it's perfectly mild.  It's darkest moments are some of the funniest, especially the mayhem caused by the Halloween Town Christmas gifts, such as the sharp-toothed, bullet-riddled wooden duck and a little boy given a shrunken head.
Today, more to do with the film's enormous popularity, including with families, rather than Disney's new broader range of product, NIGHTMARE is released as a "Walt Disney Pictures" film, on home formats and with its annual limited 3D re-issue.  The film has become so iconic and highly-marketable with merchandise in all forms that it's even become a staple of the Disney Parks, with Disneyland, CA featuring a store, Le Bat en Rouge, which features primarily NIGHTMARE merchandise, and much of the Halloween and holiday season decorating incorporating Burtonesque elements.  Most notably, Disneyland's The Haunted Mansion gets an elaborate makeover from late-September through early January as The Haunted Mansion Holiday, in which Jack Skellington has visited and brought Christmas to the mansion, complete with a new NIGHTMARE-inspired soundtrack, a full redesign and full-size audio-animatronics of Jack and Oogie Boogie, with multiple cameos by Zero.  I like the original Haunted Mansion a lot better though, and it's beyond me why they insist on having a holidays-themed Haunted Mansion throughout the month of October, when it would be most obvious to keep it traditional.  Oh well.
Affection toward THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS is torn between two factions, cinephiles and so-called "Mall-Goths" (at my high school, we called them emos), the latter giving the film an unfortunate reputation by creating an association between Jack Skellington and dirty hoodies worn by awkward teenage introverts.  As well as NIGHTMARE merchandise sells at Hot Topic stores, I wonder how many of those angsty pubescents have seen the movie recently.  It's so much happier than them.