RECURRING NIGHTMARE

By Peter Howell

From The Toronto Star, 10.27.2000

Among the many reasons to appreciate the simultaneous re-release to theatres and DVD of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas is that it's now a prime example of old-school animation.

Since Nightmare was released during the Halloween week of 1993, the use of computer-generated cartoons and special effects in movies has escalated to the point where it's hard to get excited anymore. If you can imagine something, a computer can probably make it move. Ho-hum.

Not so with Nightmare, which required three years of painstaking stop-motion animation--the old Gumby And Pokey kind you hardly see anymore--to bring to the screen a wondrously scary vision that Tim Burton had more than a decade earlier when toiling as a Disney animator.

The characters are all mostly dead in Nightmare, but the film is alive with images and song.

It concerns the plight of a skeletal figure named Jack Skellington (voiced by Chris Sarandon, sung by Danny Elfman) who has grown tired of organizing the ghastly entertainment in his one-holiday village, Halloween Town.

His frustration is shared by a stitched-together ghoulfriend Sally (voiced by Catherine O'Hara), who worships Jack from afar.

During a long stroll in the woods, Jack discovers a portal into another village, one where Christmas is celebrated year round. Suddenly Jack's life, er, death has new meaning. Move over, Santa!

The Nightmare Before Christmas is a marvellous feat of imagination, a treat for the eye and ear. It's best appreciated in a movie theatre, but the DVD offers the added attraction of backstage glimpses: storyboards, deleted scenes and commentaries by director Henry Selick and photographer Pete Kozachik which reveal why good stop-motion is so hard to do. It took 180 interchangeable heads, each with a different look, to give Jack a full range of facial expressions.

See it, or see it again, but keep in mind that the film could give very young children nightmares. Jack may be the most lively skeleton since Keith Richards, but he's no cuddly toy.