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Welcome to Holiday World, a loose confederation of party towns, each in charge of a single day (St. Valentine's, St. Patrick's, Easter and so on). In Halloweentown, the local industry is genial fright, and Jack Skellington is the dapper master of the revels. Jack's face, a white bowling ball for a player with two thumbs, rests on a bat bow tie and a slim, elegant, tuxedoed frame. "He has a very nice balance of long arms and fingers," says Selick, "and he moves like Fred Astaire." But lately, nothing has set this Astaire astir. "There's an empty place in my bones," he moans in Elfman's superbly sarcophagal baritone, "that calls out for something unknown." If Jack weren't long dead, he'd be suffering a mid-life crisis.
When he stumbles down an immaculate hill into the bright smiles and lights of Christmas Town, he is like Dorothy uprooted from gray Kansas and crash- landing in her dream of Oz. "What's this?" he sings. "There's color everywhere./ What's this? There're white things in the air." Dazzled, he resolves to produce this pageant himself this year: to, well, kidnap Santa Claus and distribute Halloween-style presents under the tree. This superproduction will be Jack's Heaven's Gate. Everything goes wrong when he becomes the ghost that stole Christmas.
Nightmare can be viewed as a parable of cultural imperialism, of the futility of imposing one's entertainment values on another society. (Euro Disneyland might come to some minds.) The apolitical moral is: cultivate your own garden or graveyard. Don't try to be somebody else. Know your place and your strengths, and make the most of them.
Words to live by, and Burton always has -- even when he was an apprentice animator a decade ago at Disney. There he wrote the poem that was the source for this film, and there he met another renegade animator, named Henry Selick.
"I feel like Horton Hatches the Egg," Selick says, invoking the sacred Seuss. "I was given this egg from Tim and Danny and took it to San Francisco to turn it into something else." Selick -- who has made stop-motion magic in Pillsbury Doughboy commercials, MTV promos and his own, profoundly bent short film Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions -- assembled the team of stop-motion specialists, armature designers and puppetmakers. "The shooting schedule was about two years," notes David Hoberman, president of Disney's Touchstone division, who godfathered the project, "and Henry was up there every day keeping 140 people going strong."
Stop-motion is the most labor-intensive form of making movies. Imagine filming a stage play one frame at a time. The characters' armatures (bodies) must be created, costumes designed, sets built, dressed and lighted. Places, everybody! Action! -- for exactly 1/24th of a second. The camera stops, the animators scrunch over the set and give Jack, say, a new head with a subtly different expression, or move the figure's pipe-cleaner limbs a silly millimeter. And again and again: almost a hundred of these meticulous increments to get just four seconds of footage.