Quite timely…
My fifth pick for my “Animation Thesis” review series is a film that’s unique in that it can be both a Halloween movie and a Christmas movie…
The motion picture is none other than The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Released in the autumn of 1993 from Walt Disney Pictures through their “adult” Touchstone Pictures label, The Nightmare Before Christmas was a particular milestone for the long-form stop-motion animated feature. While numerous films done in that medium had been around for years, The Nightmare Before Christmas took one of animation’s many forms and set a new template for all the works to come…
The Nightmare Before Christmas is often known to the general public as a Tim Burton affair, when in reality it was actually directed by master animator Henry Selick, making it his feature directorial debut. Burton had conceived The Nightmare Before Christmas as a poem in the early 1980s, when he was working for Walt Disney Productions, then a ship that was still without a rudder. A functioning creative leadership is what the studio needed, even over a decade after its founder’s passing. Among Burton’s earliest work at Disney, the best known pieces were the ones he had done for the ill-fated animated feature The Black Cauldron. His concept sketches actually had wowed a lot of the team working on the film, and even its producer – long-time veteran Joe Hale… But unfortunately, Hale couldn’t woo the folks on the upper deck, and The Black Cauldron ended up having a more typical Disney animated feature look.
via MovieWeb
Tim Burton and Henry Selick were in the same boat as many of the other young, ambitious artists working at the Mouse in the early 1980s. Many of them were frustrated working on rather retrograde, conservative pictures like The Fox and the Hound. Burton was backed by a couple of Disney head honchos who saw potential in him, and let him make offbeat little experiments on his downtime like the stop-motion short Vincent (which Disney only screened in some venues in the fall of 1982) and his live-action featurette Frankenweenie. One of those very heads who believed in Burton was Thomas Wilhite, who was always something of a risk-taker within the walls of the Disney building. A bad boy who didn’t last too long. Both of those shorts, for those who haven’t seen them, were done in black-and-white. At the time of its release, Vincent was weirder than anything that left the Disney stable past Walt’s passing, and Frankenweenie was heartfelt and charming in ways one had never really seen in a previous Disney film. By the time Frankenweenie was completed, Burton’s advocates were mostly gone, and Burton was let go from the company in the middle of 1984. Disney later attached a heavily edited version of Frankenweenie to a theatrical re-release of Pinocchio. The former Disney animator immediately pursued live-action endeavors, and immediately found success in that field. After all, it was the mid-1980s, and the 80s were all about the weirder. Burton fit right in with the freaks, and little by little the mainstream began to dug what he was up to. In turn, this underground movement, now with time to shine on the surface, would eventually help animation.
Henry Selick, on the other hand, was in and out of Disney. When not working for the mouse, he was lending his hand to similarly off-beat animated works such as John Korty’s buried cut-out animation feature Twice Upon a Time, worked on commercials and also various IDs for the relatively new MTV. Then he eventually directed his own short, Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions, which was intended at one point to start a series. For whom? The very network Selick was doing IDs for. Like Burton, his work was very distinctive, and he was as much of a freethinker as his colleague with his own stamp. When it comes to the young punks at the Disney studio in the early 80s, both of them were on the radical end of the spectrum.
Burton was let go right before a complete management change occurred onboard the R.S.S. Walt Disney Productions. Yes, after Roy E. Disney – the nephew of Walt – brought in Paramount executives Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and former WB executive Frank Wells… Everything changed… But it was a little too late, because Burton was already on a roll, elsewhere. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Batman made him a hot, in-demand director. His unusual and weird productions hit at the right time. If Henry Selick had the chance to do a feature, he’d probably make it big during this era, too. Selick, however, continued to do various work and didn’t quite sink his teeth into a feature.
In 1990, hot off the runaway success of Batman, Burton had realized that Disney still had the rights to the Christmas story he had conceived and always wanted to go back to. That year, Disney and their new leaders were still riding high on the successes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Oliver & Company, and The Little Mermaid. A major resurgence in feature animation was underway, and Disney started seeing record-breaking numbers and blockbuster totals again, on top of strong reviews from the high-profile critics. Multiple distributors wanted their answer to Disney and competitor Don Bluth’s box office hits. The storm was about to get more intense… In a move that probably wouldn’t be taken by the company today, Disney paired up with Burton to turn his poem into a feature-length stop-motion animated feature, with old pal Henry Selick – an equally weirdo kinda filmmaker – being put on the director’s chair. Selick took the job because Burton was far too busy with Batman Returns, due out in two years from that point.
No matter how different it would’ve been from, say, Beauty and the Beast… No matter how it would be received by family audiences that regularly attended Disney films… No matter how it would turn out… Walt Disney Pictures committed to a film like this, with a lot to lose. Budgeted at $18 million, Selick and the team were thankfully able to experiment and to make the movie that they had wanted to make. They all set up shop, got the movie done in the Bay Area (not too far from where Pixar was operating at the time), and had little interference from the Disney higher-ups. The resulting film was not some innocuous children’s movie not dissimilar to most of the films coming from the competitors, nor was it a generic copycat of a previous Disney success. Put next to Aladdin from the previous year, it was something else. The Nightmare Before Christmas stood out back in 1993, and it still stands out some 25 years later.
Why is that?
The Nightmare Before Christmas, for all its twisted art direction and inventive touches, isn’t all high and mighty in its storyline, nor is it a work that’s concerned with hitting a target audience. It is also an example of a pre-Toy Story film that works off of a wildly imaginative “What If?” premise. What if all the imagery and icons associated with each holiday came from its own land and into your world? The Nightmare Before Christmas begins in Halloween Town. As you’d expect, it’s a non-stop parade of ghosts, ghouls, freaks, and frights. Dark, striking architecture and muted skies, with all sorts of strange and sometimes scary things going on… All laid out beautifully in the opening number. In fact, this opening is so brilliant, the rest of the film has somewhat of a hard time living up to it. I mean, look at all the different things you see in Halloween Town during this whole opening stretch!
The Pumpkin King. The de facto leader of Halloween Town. Jack Skellington… Who is he? He is someone who is tired of the same ol’ same ol’. He stumbles into Christmas Town, portrayed as a sort-of weirder, Rankin/Bass-like world, but one that is nonetheless jolly. Confusing at first, he is completely enamored by the sights and sounds, and by the glimpses he gets of Santa Claus. Soon, it is decided that Christmas will be handled by Jack and his Halloween Town comrades.
He then assigns tricksters Lock, Shock, and Barrel to bring Santa to Halloween Town, but to leave the mysterious, gluttonous Oogie Boogie out of it. Naturally, the trio doesn’t abide, and they land Santa in the clutches of a highly entertaining baddie who adds some stakes to the narrative. The basic storyline does follow the Disney Renaissance template in some ways, but when it seems to err a little too close to that formula, which was showing signs of wearing out by then, Nightmare goes another direction. Instead of the story revolving around something so complicated, The Nightmare Before Christmas instead strolls through its scant 70-or-so-minute runtime (you don’t see much of THAT in feature animation anymore), and feels more like a few days with these characters than something that’s so concerned with plot, plot, plot. The romance angle isn’t as prominent as one might expect, and Oogie Boogie isn’t even introduced until more than halfway through the picture, and most of it just focuses on Jack taking over Christmas and how that goes awry. By contrast, a good number of Disney Feature Animation’s contemporary works put the romance and the big bad villains first, this has those elements kind of subdued.
Part musical, part love story, part self-realization journey, part holiday tale, part spooky adventure… It’s a little bit of everything, a story that’s perfectly suited for the medium. A love letter to a cocktail of different things, from the holiday specials made by the aforementioned Rankin-Bass to German expressionist horror films (a staple in Burton’s work), The Nightmare Before Christmas manages to be a subtle smorgasbord in the world of mainstream feature animation. Selick injects the proceedings with his ace sense of worldbuilding, hitting all the nooks and crannies of Halloween Town without fuss. The characters leap right off the screen. From the first few moments you see them, you know them well. Jack Skellington may want more, but you can tell that deep down he’s pained by routine and monotony. Who isn’t? Instead of having a clear goal, Jack seeks to break the glass, blow something wide open. Sally is not dissimilar, pained by being little more than entertainment for her abhorrent creator, who just wishes to have a life and be the one for Jack. Even if their romance isn’t as front and center as Jack’s need to change his long life, it’s still nonetheless effective and iconic. Did we really need any more scenes centering around the two of them together? It’s a brilliant, deceptively simplistic way of storytelling that – for whatever reason – is often looked down upon.
Everything else is also just right. The wonderfully spooky and beautifully atmospheric score was done by Danny Elfman, lead singer of Oingo Boingo, and a long-time Burton collaborator. A match made in heaven, for Oingo Boingo’s music fit right in with the more bizarre sounds of the 80s, if not embodied them. Elfman also provides Jack’s singing voice, as well as the voice of Barrel and the Clown with the Tear-Away Face. Elfman infuses wonder, grim, mysterious, and melancholy into the score and musical numbers. Both Halloween styles and Christmas aesthetics are nailed visually and sonically, it’s hard to imagine such a film being about both holidays working under someone else’s direction. Would the tone have felt more Halloween than Christmasy? Or vice-versa? No, somehow, Selick, Burton, Elfman, everyone on board struck a perfect balance. The movie is sooooo consistent, it’s almost ridiculous. You ever wonder why people still debate to this day whether it’s a “Halloween movie” or a “Christmas movie”?
Despite having a few creepy moments and some frights here and there, The Walt Disney Company feared that The Nightmare Before Christmas would be a bit much for young children. By 1993, Disney’s executives had a firm idea of what a Disney animated feature was, regardless of whether that idea contradicted Walt’s outlook or not. Even if films like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin had elements that upset children, they were still family-friendly enough to be mainline “Disney” releases. They had to be. Those were the confines the writers, directors, and story teams had to work within. Anything above a “G” was unacceptable for a Disney animated feature, especially in the wake of the PG-rated Black Cauldron. The Nightmare Before Christmas, much like Who Framed Roger Rabbit before it, wasn’t obligated to be like that. The film earned the coveted PG rating (which is given out to just about everything nowadays), and was released under the Touchstone banner, a last minute move. The Nightmare Before Christmas thankfully garnered warm reception back in the day. After a small opening, the film legged its way up to $50 million domestically, which was a cut above what many non-Disney competitor animated films were making at the time. (The closest was Fox/Kroyer Films’ FernGully with $24 million. What a gap!) 1993 was a year without a new Disney animated feature, for The Lion King had to be delayed from its original Thanksgiving 1993 release because it needed a lot of tune-up. The Nightmare Before Christmas somewhat filled the void. None of the other animated features released in 1993 cracked $15 million stateside. Some audiences were clearly a bit hungry for something that was a little different.
The success lead to one last stop-motion collaboration between Selick and Burton, this time a film that paired puppetry with live-action. The result, the higher-budgeted Roald Dahl adaptation James and the Giant Peach, was what Nightmare wasn’t: A commercial miss. It was even a mainline Disney release. After that, Disney ceased locking into weirder, offbeat productions and focused only on Disney Feature Animation, Pixar, and the occasional Miramax get. This was a while after Disney president Frank Wells’ death and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s subsequent exit from the company. Touchstone, a label which Disney created for more adult-oriented features, could’ve been a perfect outlet for animated films that could change the industry. Instead, Disney seemed content with Pixar’s family features, which seemed to effortlessly be great for both adults and kids alike without being too edgy. A fine balance that Walt struck decades ago, a fine balance that Disney’s executives couldn’t hit with Disney Feature Animation’s output. Nothing Pixar has ever put out was as envelope-pushing as Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It’s hard to imagine the Disney of today letting out a feature like that and The Nightmare Before Christmas. The neglecting of Tim Burton’s fairly recent stop-motion oddball picture Frankenweenie and the subsequent scrapping of Henry Selick’s Pixar collaboration The Shadow King more than sealed that deal.
This is because Disney’s done trying to expand upon the Nightmare wave.
“The Nightmare wave?” you may ask…
As time passed, The Nightmare Before Christmas slowly became a cult sensation. By 2003… It was all over your local mall Hot Topics. Everyone was wild about Jack Skellington. People were going gaga over a movie that was already a decade old. Disney wisely took note of this, and exploited the hell out of it. Jack soon began appearing in new Disney-themed products, like Kingdom Hearts 2. He was becoming as prominent as Mickey Mouse and Stitch! In 2006, the film was converted to 3D and was given theatrical re-releases year after year. After this re-release, The Nightmare Before Christmas was now a full-fledged “Disney movie.” No longer do the current versions of the movie open with the Touchstone logo and corresponding credits, we now see the Disney castle before the movie, an in-film “Walt Disney Pictures” presents tag, it is now truly a Walt Disney Pictures release…
Like it almost was! How times change, huh? Nightmare may have seemed a touch dodgy to those who were running the company in 1993, but by the mid-aughts, they felt it fit right in with their animated features and various live-action works. Keep in mind, by 2006, Disney had already released two PG-13 films that weren’t under the Touchstone/Hollywood/Miramax trees. They had also put out a couple of animated features, both from WDFA and Pixar, that bore the once-forbidden PG rating. Again… Times have changed. I think Roger Rabbit is slowly getting this kind of treatment, too. Basically, Disney looked at Nightmare‘s rising popularity and tried something… They took some risks. On top of getting Burton to direct a live-action take on the classic Alice in Wonderland stories, they greenlit Burton’s Frankenweenie feature adaptation, and greenlit Selick’s The Shadow King, which – again – was to be a co-production with Pixar… But Frankenweenie was in production when Walt Disney Pictures went through some management changes. Out went any possible future full of Burton and Selick animated Disney treats. Frankenweenie was a big loss at the box office despite garnering strong reviews and despite being nominated for Best Animated Feature that year. The Shadow King was already DOA before Frankenweenie was even released.
Outside of The Nightmare Before Christmas, few feature-length stop-motion films have cracked the box office. That’s a discussion for another day, but films are still made in this seemingly-niche medium. Nightmare‘s advancements lead to great works, such as Aardman’s Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Laika is currently America’s stop-motion wonder house, being the studio that gave us Henry Selick’s adaptation of Coraline, alongside excellent films like ParaNorman and Kubo & the Two Strings. Thankfully, they are readying their next feature (Missing Link) and have more planned, should things work out for them. Wes Anderson did two marvelous stop-motion films (Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs), and perhaps might make another sometime in the future. (Let’s just hope the wait isn’t *as* long!) Stop-motion may not be at the forefront in features, but it’s in the corner, and often times it’s being quite glorious… Without The Nightmare Before Christmas, we possibly wouldn’t have these gems.
Now let’s put aside all the achievements… The Nightmare Before Christmas simply holds up because of its just right mixture of the weird, the scary, the funny, the surprising, the romantic, and the adventurous. Its characters are iconic and its musical numbers are beyond catchy, it’s a holiday film that can be enjoyed over the course of three months. Maybe more! No pandering, no playing it safe, The Nightmare Before Christmas just is, and I think it daring to be unlike the rest of the animated stuff of the 90s is what made it pop, and what makes it special to this day, in a world where we’ve seen Selick and Burton follow-ups and films that took cues from theirs. The Nightmare Before Christmas tells a bizarre story that only animation can do, and uses animation’s freedom to wow, to amplify the spectacle, and to do what live-action just can’t do. That more than makes The Nightmare Before Christmas an animation thesis, an example of animation being a wonderful and limitless art form…
