With spooky season upon us (even with that snow storm) we have to talk about the Nightmare Before Christmas. In this 1993 stop-motion movie you follow the story of Jack Skellington, the King of Halloween Town as he discovers Christmas Town and decides to celebrate Christmas. The movie was directed by Henry Selick, but the idea was conceived by Tim Burton.
Originally a poem that Burton wrote in 1982 while he was working at Disney, he wanted to produce it as either a short film or a thirty minute TV special, but neither got off the ground.Throughout the years the idea kept coming back to him, finally in 1991 development started. Burton was unable to direct the movie due to other obligations, and he didn’t want to be involved in the painstaking process of stop motion. Even without directing he was still involved in the movie as he was a producer.
The movie has 20 stages and 120 workers during production. During peak production, all 20 sets were being used. A total of 109 440 frames were taken for the film. The filmmakers made 227 puppets for the movie. Jack alone had about 100 different heads. Sally didn’t have multiple heads, just different faces, this was to preserve the way her hair flowed. She had ten types of faces, each with eleven expressions.
When talking about Burton’s involvement Selick said “It’s as though he laid the egg, and I sat on it and hatched it. He wasn’t involved in a hands-on way, but his hand is in it. It was my job to make it look like ‘a Tim Burton film’, which is not so different from my own films.” Selick stated that Burton was not in San Francisco, where the movie was being filmed, as he was away directing Batman Returns, and in pre-production of Ed Wood. Over the course of the two years of production Burton was around for around ten days.
The Nightmare Before Christmas has become a cult classic, being able to watch it for both Halloween and Christmas. Imagine the painstaking process of having to animate so much by hand.