by Rowan Wood, Contributing Writer
I’m sick of the debate about whether The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Christmas or a Halloween movie. Just like Die Hard, it can be whatever you want it to be, and you don’t have to allow your viewing experience to be influenced by the biased opinions of some film geeks on the internet.
Speaking of, I am one of those biased film geeks. Also, Die Hard is objectively a Christmas movie, and I will be taking no questions at this time.
I first watched The Nightmare Before Christmas when I was very young, and I didn’t realize it was one of my favorite movies until recently. It has everything I could love about a film — endless creativity, an inventively-built immersive world, and a competent voice cast who understand the material and who their audience is. It’s Tim Burton through and through, which makes the fact that he didn’t direct it even more bizarre.
That’s right, Tim Burton didn’t direct The Nightmare Before Christmas, despite his name being plastered all over it. In truth, it’s based on a poem Burton wrote in 1982 while working as a Disney animator, and after years of failed development in various mediums, he finally convinced Disney to produce it in 1990. He didn’t end up directing because of his commitments to Batman Returns, giving directing duties to Henry Selick (who would later direct Coraline and James and the Giant Peach). Selick was more suited to the “painstakingly slow process of stop-motion animation,” which was another reason Burton did not want to be involved. I don’t blame him.
Then there’s the fact that Nightmare’s story is refreshingly simple. There are a lot of moving parts, and it’s utterly flabbergasting that it all fits neatly into 76 minutes, but you get a sense of the world and its dynamics very quickly — the opening song, “This is Halloween”, makes sure of that. That leaves the film’s remaining runtime to focus on its story, rather than establishing what you need to know.
I love that this is a musical. There are 11 songs in total, each with their elaborate musical numbers and clever lyrics to keep things interesting. Danny Elfman, who wrote the songs, also provides the singing voice for our protagonist Jack Skellington. Many of the songs are ones I can put on anytime and happily sing along to, and some have become Halloween classics. Elfman’s prowess for film scores is well known (that, too, is shown off in Nightmare), but his magnificent songwriting skills are on full display here. There was recently a Nightmare Before Christmas live concert in Los Angeles, and it pained me not to be able to attend, but it thrilled me to see such a big crowd there for it. The recordings I saw only proved that there is still a widespread love for this film and its songs, and that just warms my heart.
Jack’s spoken lines are performed by Chris Sarandon, who was cast to match Elfman’s singing. Jack is the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, but he’s grown tired doing the same old thing every year. Pining after Jack is rag-doll Sally (voiced by Catherine O’Hara), who doesn’t have the heart to admit her feelings. After Jack stumbles into other holiday worlds, he is captivated by the concept of Christmas and decides to do it himself that year. Though she gets a vision that proves things will not work out for him, Sally helps Jack to bring his Halloween-skewed vision of Christmas to life.
Think How the Grinch Stole Christmas, if the Grinch thought his actions were genuinely helpful and he was in charge of an army of nightmare monster toymakers. There is a villain here, and that’s the boogeyman, appropriately named Oogie Boogie (voiced by Ken Page). I don’t think this movie really needed a villain, but he gets some of the best set pieces and his henchmen, Lock, Shock and Barrel, provide some of the biggest laughs. These are all crazy characters for a crazy movie, and I wouldn’t have expected anything else from a Burton project.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of the rare movies I can put on anytime. It makes me feel happy, it makes me feel sad and it makes me laugh every single time. It’s a masterclass of stop-motion animation, and has the fanbase and cult status to back it up. If you’ve never seen it, there are two solid holiday opportunities to check this one out — do yourself a favor!
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