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Skellington Productions, where Nightmare was shot, holds 20 miniature stages, all of which were busy in the final days of filming last summer. A notice on one of the walls was apt: no whining beyond this point. The work demanded an almost Zenlike concentration. "When you really get into a shot," says animator Mike Belzer, "your mind gets slowed down. You're thinking one frame at a time, and you start seeing everything in slow motion." As one crew member put it, "Nothing happened in real time on the set, except lunch."
Still, moviegoers don't care about the effort that goes into a film, any more than they go to see a picture because of its high budget (this one, says Disney boss Jeffrey Katzenberg, cost "not much more than $20 million"). They care about the effect. Nightmare, in its loving-friend story between Jack and Sally, a kind of Roald Dahl rag doll, has enough heart to win the Sleepless in Seattle crowd. More important, the film is packed with enough clever detail to give pleasure to anyone with intelligent eyes. You'll be scouring the corners of Burton's landscape to investigate the duck-billed latitude of an evil scientist's metal cranium, or to peer inside the burlap skin of the wormy villain Oogie Boogie.
The filmmakers' ordeal is over; their trick is ready. Your treat opens soon, at theaters near you. It's a banquet both utterly individual and very much indebted to the classic Disney cartoons. But with, as is Tim Burton's genius, a twist. In Snow White, a stepmother's sleek exterior hid a poison-apple heart. Here the outwardly grotesque masks good feeling and creative daydreaming run splendidly amuck. The film's both mental and experimental, more melodious than Yentl and at heart as soft and gentle as a Christmas kiss.