Looking Back at the Release of The Nightmare Before Christmas
By Amaya Lewis-Patel
21 years ago today, The Nightmare Before Christmas was released to reviews that praised its offbeat style and story as a ‘postmodern fractured fable’, while expressing fears about it ‘scaring kids’. A critical sensation and the first animated film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, Nightmare was only a moderate box office success. However, its home video release prompted a cult following amongst adults and children alike. Stunning visuals, Danny Elfman’s catchy soundtrack, and the heartwarming rehabilitation of would-be monstrous characters, certainly make it a memorable film.
Burton was inspired by childhood memories of holidays – albeit secularised and ‘Americanised’ versions. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he recounted his love of ‘[buying] stuff’ that ‘gave you some sort of texture all of a sudden’, and the accompanying media like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Burton was also drawn to the notion of the outsider-protagonist, inverting The Grinch Who Stole Christmas to portray a ‘character that’s passionate but doesn’t know what he’s doing’.
Indeed, there are many similarities between Jack Skellington’s attempts to reinvigorate Halloween and Burton’s own efforts to produce the film. Its 1993 release was the result of over a decade of incubation. In 1982, the twenty-four-year-old Disney conceptual artist Tim Burton wrote a rhyming children’s poem about Christmas. Burton devised a storyboard for a short film based on the poem with his colleague, the stop motion animator Henry Selick. Production was halted in 1984 when Disney fired Burton for pursuing projects deemed too dark for their young audience.
Following a series of commercial successes including Beetlejuice, Batman and Edward Scissorshands, Burton successfully remarketed the film to Disney and was allowed a much larger budget. Filming began in 1991, with over 120 crew members and 230 sets in a huge 40,000 foot studio space. Jack Skellington’s puppet, one of 227 others, had over 400 heads. Single scenes could take a week to film. It was the largest and most ambitious stop motion film to date.
Due to the pressures of directing Batman Returns, Burton only produced Nightmare, with Selick as director. He only visited the studio a handful of times in the two years of production, yet the film was marketed as ‘Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas’. However, this name was largely the result of Disney’s reluctance to associate itself with the film. ‘They were afraid of their core audience hating the film’, Selick later recalled, and dismissed it as ‘too dark and too scary’. Nightmare was released under Disney’s Touchstone Pictures label, aimed at a more adult audience. Any connection to Disney was heavily downplayed.
The 2006 reissue of Nightmare in Disney Digital 3D cemented Disney’s abashed reappropriation of the film. Though it may not bear the traditional hallmarks of a Disney film, it expanded popular notions of what could be included in children’s films – and set a high bar for all subsequent animated features. Burton and Selick’s masterpiece has undoubtedly joined the canon of Christmas films.
Yet the question remains: is it a Halloween film or a Christmas film?