A Sweet and Scary Treat

The Nightmare Before Christmas spins a fun-house fantasy for two holidays

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What's this? A Disney Studio cartoon with banshees baying at the moon! What's this? An animated feature where each creature wants to eat you with a spoon! What's this? Black hats, black cats, a pack of blackguard rats! And bats that function as cravats! What's this? In just a spooky second you'll be certain that behind the cartoon curtain it's not Disney, it's Tim Burton. And it's bliss!

Expect the impossible from Burton, whose directorial vision is uniquely odd and charming. His previous features -- Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns -- are outsider epics that locate a core of heroic melancholy inside grand gargoyle comedy. They invoke a child's giddy, chilly thrill of fear and wonder. Every Tim Burton film is Halloween and Christmas: ghoul scary and candy-cane sweet.

His new film, an animated fantasy called Nightmare Before Christmas, conjures up a fun house of funereal glamour. Part Grimm, part Gorey, part charnel Charles Addams, the movie traces the cataclysm that occurs when Pumpkin King Jack Skellington, creative director of Halloweentown, decides to have himself a buried little Christmas. Nightmare has a cunning screenplay by Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands, The Secret Garden) and is threaded with 10 witty Danny Elfman songs, which sound like Kurt Weill settings for Dr. Seuss verses. But the immediate and lasting impact is visual. Nightmare is the first major feature made in the glorious, laborious process called stop-motion animation, which brings a three-dimensional persuasiveness to the puppets that populate Burton's world. Stop-motion whiz Henry Selick directed from Burton's original story and sketches, but Burton, 34, is the film's most breathless salesman. "I just get rushes from it -- it's so beautiful!" he says with his usual frantic geniality; there always seems to be a stiff breeze agitating his curly hair, and in his head a torrent of images too baroque to be translated into words. "It's all texture you can touch. You feel the energy of things moving in real space; you feel characters in the actual light."

The full title -- Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas" -- is a shock, for this is a film from the Walt Disney Co. Before, only the founder got possessive credit. But now Burton, with two other projects at the studio, is heading what he calls "the Evil Twin Division" of Disney. And why not? He is a kindred, if loopier, spirit to Walt. He takes artistic risks that pay off by blending outlandish invention with sturdy sentiment. He is also the poet of the emotionally excluded. "((Tim and I)) both feel like outsiders," says Thompson, "and we love to do stories about what it feels like to be on the outside."

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