Halloween beckons, with pumpkin-flavored goodies sprouting and silly costumes in store. As we begin our pivot to the Christmas season, it has become my tradition to revisit one of my favorite films and indulge once more in the simple delights of childhood. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas turns 21 this year and fortunately, it has aged remarkably well. Its gallows humor and mix of ghouls and goblins has become the paragon of this in-between time of celebration and superstition.
Burton has come to be associated with anything dark and ghoulish, but the inspiration for The Nightmare Before Christmas, which started out as a three-page poem, was not so morbid. As a young animator in the early 1980s, he came across Halloween merchandise being taken down in a store and replaced by a Christmas display. The unlikely combination of monsters and misfits with Santa and his reindeer — as well as touches from the classic television specials Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! — provided fodder for the film.
In the stop-motion musical, Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, yearns for something more than the same old tricks and treats. He soon stumbles upon festive Christmas Town, where “absolutely no one’s dead,” and decides to bring the exuberance back home. He kidnaps Santa Claus and impersonates him, delivering unusual gifts to unsuspecting children. While his heart is in the right place, he doesn’t understand the true meaning of the holiday. It’s up to Frankenstein monster-like Sally, Jack’s rag doll love interest, to stitch things back together.
DANCING BONES
The 1993 production forms part of a continuous thread that runs from Disney’s earliest animated short to Burton’s subsequent projects. Jack Skellington reminds me of the quartet of dancing bones in 1929’s The Skeleton Dance, the first in Walt Disney and Carl Stalling’s Silly Symphonies series which was, in turn, a nod to medieval danse macabre iconography. These moving skeletal systems can also be glimpsed in the Killers video Bones, which Burton directed in 2006.
Eagle-eyed fans even suggest that all of Tim Burton’s original films are connected. They say Abercrombie, the dog in his first ever stop-motion short film Vincent, becomes a spirit in Halloween Town and is adopted by Jack Skellington, who renamed it Zero. The Corpse Bride’s Victoria, Frankenweenie’s Elsa and The Nightmare Before Christmas’s Sally share enough traits that you wouldn’t be faulted for assuming they were animated by the same spirit. It also helps that Jack’s likeness, toggling timelines, has also made cameos in Burton’s other movies such as James and the Giant Peach, Beetlejuice, Sleepy Hollow and Alice in Wonderland.
‘THIS IS HALLOWEEN’
Of course, the music by Danny Elfman, of the ‘70s American band Oingo Boingo, has contributed to Nightmare’s enduring appeal. The Oscar-nominated composer says that writing the soundtrack was one of the easiest jobs he’s ever had since he “had a lot in common with Jack Skellington.”
While The Nightmare Before Christmas has yet to be turned into a full-blown stage musical, Elfman will be back this season for concerts of his compositions from Burton’s filmography. “The performances, which will feature a live orchestra and choir, are scheduled for Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 at the Nokia Theater in downtown Los Angeles,” according to the Los Angeles Times. He will be performing a new Nightmare song, This Is Halloween.
CHERISHED HOLIDAYS
Burton, whose work was the subject of a Museum of Modern Art exhibit in 2010, is aware of the pitfalls of such a distinct visual style. “People thought I made Coraline. Henry (Selick, who directed Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas) is a great filmmaker, but when they say something, they should have to say the person’s name. ‘From the producer of’ — well, there are eight producers,” he told the New York Times two years ago. “It’s slightly misleading. Not slightly, it’s very misleading, and that’s not fair to the consumer.”
In 2001, Disney wanted to produce a computer-animated sequel to The Nightmare Before Christmas. Burton convinced them to drop the idea, explaining “I was always very protective of (Nightmare) not to do sequels or things of that kind.” Two decades after its release, his original vision has stood the test of time, growing to embody the intersection of two cherished holidays.
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