ANI-MOVIES, *The Nightmare Before Christmas

Considering that there hadn't been another feature-length theatrically released American stop-motion animated movie since 1984's The Adventures Of Mark Twain, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas from 1993 brought the nearly lost art back into the spotlight. Considering that fully CGI-animated films were still on the horizon, there was still time for this underused craft to make a significant comeback. Starting out as a children's book Burton wrote in the 80s, he combined this with his own stop-motion short titled Vincent (narrated by Vincent Prince himself!) which caught Hollywood's attention. Disney produced this under their Touchstone Pictures label and directed by inbetweener animator Henry Selick who went on to help start up Laika Studios by directing Coraline, plus the screenplay was written by Caroline Thompson and adapted by Michael McDowell. The film was first seen as being a long animated short about 40+ minutes and modeled after all those Rankin-Bass holiday TV one-shots combined with their forgotten Halloween hit Mad Monster Party, but it was deemed a little too dark to be another annual cartoon special, so it was instead prolonged into a single feature. It made a big splash upon its premiere and continued to be a larger cult clash. Over the years, it became a gothic masterpiece that made Spencer's Gifts a cool mint, not to mention gaining its own aisle in every department store during both the Halloween and Christmas season. The phenomenon is more owed to its clashing of cheery Noel and scary-but-harmless monsters which made for one of the most unique cinematic experiences of its time, plus making it into a jumpy musical done by Oingo Boing's Danny Elfman which made it a tentpole in marketing and merchandise.

Turns out the major American holidays each have their own little world such as Easter and Thanksgiving, while Halloween Town is run by Jack Skelington, a living skeleton with panache for dropping a musical number for any situation. After another year's successful Halloween by him and the other townsfolk made entirely of monsters, Jack feels unfulfilled with the same routine, and a trip through a special door takes him to Christmas Town. He falls head over heels for this newly discovered holiday and plans on doing his own version of Christmas. He sends three children with the task of capturing Santa Claus which actually takes them several weeks while Jack and the other scary citizens create creepy versions of beloved old-time toys. Helping Jack is the stitchpunk girl Sally who is the Frankenstein's monster of this world, and for some reason has a psychic vision of Jack's plan which is destined to end in flames, but despite her best efforts she fails to stop his resolve to take over Christmas. Santa is taken to the lair of Oogie Boogie, an outcasted boogeyman who is introduced in the third act as the movie's only genuine villain if you leave out Jack's whole "ransacking another guy's holiday" scheme, and Oogie wants to bump off Santa just for kicks. Using flying reindeer skeletons, Jack begins his Christmas Eve caper only to get the military riled up enough to shoot him out of the sky, which finally knocks some sense into him, and he rescues Santa from Oogie. Santa pulls a lightspeed rescue on Christmas while Jack and Sally finally realize their feelings for each other.

Tim Burton didn't direct or produce this but did get his name put above the title so everyone would believe he was the Bob Kane to this Bill Finger production. Danny Elfman's score played a big part in the movie's impact, and Elfman himself also performed the singing voice of Jack, while the speaking voice was done by Chris Saradon after he slayed it in Fright Night. Aside from an all-star ensemble cast, the best is the dearly departed Catherine O'Hara as Sally, plus Shock who was one of Oogie's crew. The movie does suffer from some profoundly weak dialogue, and a concept that was intended to be barely an hour long has plenty of filler material to pad it out to feature-length. For a stop-motion production, there were over a hundred artists working on this on several different sound stages, so you can imagine that this took up a lot of studio space to pull all the different worlds together, plus crafting it to Burton's vision along with a Dr. Seuss style is a miracle onto itself. Aside from the insane amount of merch that this film rakes in every holiday season, there's also several sequels, prequels, spinoffs, and of course the obligatory Kingdom Hearts crossovers. This movie led to other Tim Burton stop-motion movies like Corpse Bride and the Frankenweenie remake, plus the animated scenes in James And The Giant Peach, but to truly get the magic of the original then you owe it to yourself in theatrical screening.