The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

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Tell Me What You Feel

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

8/10

Starring the voice

Chris Sarandon

Catherine O’Hara

William Hickey

Directed by Henry Selick

Ironically this is my favorite of all Christmas Cartoons, I cherish each time I spend watching this movie, it is my all time Christmas recipe to a Merry Christmas. Leave it to the team at Halloween Town to make jingle bells sound dead and horrific. Based on a poem written by Tim Burton in 1982, The Nightmare Before Christmas is a musical fantasy horror stop motion animation, which features the Stop Motion director Henry Selick (James and The Giant Peach and Coraline 2009).

Disney first decided to make this movie as a short 30 minutes TV movie, but later decided to go ahead and make a full length animation but released it under their Touchstone Pictures Distribution name and not under their Walt Disney name because they feared, since it was a dark horror animation it will not be well received. The Nightmare Before Christmas became a hit critically and commercially, and Burton has had a time convincing Disney to drop the idea of a sequel whenever it came up.

The movie plot is about Jack Skellington, the pumpkin king of Halloween Town, who was bored of doing the same thing over again, year in year out he has remained the pumpkin king, so on one lonely stroll he stumbled on Christmas town, saw the joy all around and decided to give Santa Claus a vacation, by kidnapping him, and he breathed a new dawn into Halloween Town where they will take over Christmas and Halloween it up.

Due to Burton’s busy schedule working on Batman Returns he was not available to direct this movie so Henry Selick was called upon to do the honors. The maker constructed 227 puppets for the film and Jack himself having close to four hundred heads to display his speech and emotions.

With most of the film being songs, the voice of Jack was played by Chris Sarandon for speech and Danny Elfman the film's composer provided Jack's singing voice.

The Nightmare Before Christmas was a critical success as previously said, holding a rating of 96% in Rotten Tomatoes and making over 75 million dollars in the box office, compared to its 18 million production cost and due to its wide acceptance Disney has reissued the film under their Disney Digital 3-D format, it then became the first stop-motion animated feature to be entirely converted to 3-D.

Here is a classic Christmas drama about Santa coming to the rescue, Jack Skellington and the crew of Halloween town, are always ready to welcome you whenever you come watching, just be careful to stay away from the Oogie Boogie man, and buy this DVD.