The Nightmare Before Christmas

Based on a poem Tim Burton wrote while he was a Disney animator, The Nightmare Before Christmas was originally going to be adapted into a TV special that pays tribute to holiday classics like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Yet what it became instead was a new approach to the laborious medium of stop-motion animation that no TV special could ever achieve. Taken straight from Tim Burton’s visualizations, this delightful little movie has beautiful set and character designs that found that fine balance between unsettling and charming, with distinct sets of colors and shapes used to differentiate between Halloween Town, Christmas Town, and the human world.
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When animating this feature film, nearly 200 puppets were made for the 230 large sets built across nineteen different soundstages. The Jack Skellington puppets alone had around 400 interchangeable heads built for his different facial expressions, and filming just one minute of screen time took a whole workweek! To make the project all the more ambitious, many digital effects, such as cartoon ghosts, were included, and Danny Elfman had to start working on his now iconic musical score before the script was even complete. Yet it paid off: this crowning achievement produced by Tim Burton is now a cultural staple that came to define the entire identity of the Halloween season, as well as become a cinematic reintroduction to the art of stop-motion.

PG (V)
Fantasy/Musical
1 hr. 16 min.

Watch it for FUN.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY.