TIM BURTON'S 'NIGHTMARE' COMES TRUE

By Betsy Sharkey

From The New York Times, 10.10.1993, Late Edition--Final

It is the day after what has been an incredibly successful Halloween, filled with better-than-ever boos and bumps in the night. But while all of Halloweenland is celebrating, the Pumpkin King is forlorn. Wandering alone, bored with his job, he finds that his life lacks meaning. So begins the director Tim Burton's latest exploration of isolation, misguided passions and misperception, this time in the form of Jack Skellington. A pin-striped, pencil-thin puppet with a bat for a bow tie, Skellington moves through his world by virtue of a highly technical animation form called stop motion in the film Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas.

Alienation has been at the heart of several Burton films, most notably Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, and on the periphery of others, like Batman. But with Nightmare, Mr. Burton spins this theme into a dark fairy tale that, with the help of three-dimensional animation, seems to exist somewhere between fantasy and a hyper-reality. The 74-minute movie, which had its premiere at the New York Film Festival last night, will open on Wednesday in single theaters in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

That Jack Skellington will go slowly into that dark night--first 3 theaters, then 400, far less than the 2,000 or so for housed Aladdin--is attributable to this fact: Nightmare represents a bit of a nightmare for its producing studio. In Nightmare, the Walt Disney Company, which has established a tradition of sorts with a new animated feature each fall, has a very different form of animation and a very different story. The studio's executives are struggling to point out the difference without diluting the distinctiveness of the film. This effort has included attaching the Touchstone label rather than the Walt Disney Pictures stamp accorded all of its previous animated features and identifying the film as Tim Burton's, in case anyone was confused as to just whose Nightmare it was.

"We know it's not for 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds," says Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of the Walt Disney Studios. "There are some images that are too scary for really young ones."

The studio's research indicates three distinct potential audiences--the preteen set, people drawn by Tim Burton's reputation, and adults attracted by the film's artistic and experimental nature. The studio hopes to build on this base but will not have as much as help as it usually gets with its animated projects. While Nightmare will derive some boost from the sale of T-shirts, a line of toys based on its characters and other promotional items, there will be no chart-topping pop song and none of the massive joint promotions with a fast-food franchise that generally fuel the studio's marketing locomotive.

"Tim Burton's career has been sufficiently established so that he can afford to take some adventurous paths without a fatal impact," says Peter Bart, editor of Variety. "This may be a big success, but if it turns out to be a mistake, it won't cost him."

By most measures, Nightmare is an anomaly in the Disney animation equation. The lanky, troubled Pumpkin King is a long way from the comic twists and turns of Robin Williams's Genie in last year's Aladdin, the studio's most successful animation film to date. Although a rag doll named Sally loves him, Jack has a gloomy side that is light-years away from that of the Beast in Disney's 1991 animated hit, Beauty and the Beast.

And while Nightmare is, like its predecessors, propelled by a musical score, instead of show-stopping tunes from an Alan Menken collaboration--first with Howard Ashman, more recently with Tim Rice--there is music by Danny Elfman, who wrote the somber, driving score for Batman. Finally, the film's technique itself is unlike cel animation, which is two-dimensional, drawn by hand and as familiar as an old shoe to most adults and children.

With stop motion, miniature sets provide the stage for puppet characters designed to move with all the grace, or awkwardness, of human actors. The illusion of motion is created by changing the position of the puppets as scenes are photographed frame by frame. Claymation and characters like the Pillsbury Dough Boy use the technique but are quite distant from the highly stylized look and the technical advances represented by Nightmare.

The film had its genesis more than a decade ago, when Mr. Burton was in what he describes as a rather abstract place within Disney's animation department. "I was like the weird relative that they'd let out, then lock back up in my room," says Mr. Burton, who produced Nightmare, turning over the directing duties to the stop-motion specialist Henry Selick.

The idea for the film grew out of Mr. Burton's love of holidays and ritual and characters with good intentions gone awry. "I always liked Dr. Seuss books and Christmas and 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' which I grew up watching," he says.

At the time, Mr. Burton wrote and illustrated a parody of "A Visit From St. Nicholas" that is to be published later this month as a children's book. With a melancholy Jack Skellington as its hero, Nightmare tells the tale of Jack the Pumpkin King, who stumbles upon Christmas and wants to make it his own. His ghoulish improvements range from "a man-eating plant disguised as a wreath, and a vampire teddy bear with very sharp teeth" to a coffin sleigh and eight skeletal reindeer. The film follows Jack's creation of a disastrous Halloween-style Christmas, complete with Santa in chains and carnivorous stocking stuffers.

"I pitched it around," says Mr. Burton, "and people seemed to like it, but it never went anywhere." It was Mr. Burton who went somewhere--away from Disney animation to direct first Pee-wee's Big Adventure and ultimately the successful Batman series, among other films. But Nightmare was a story he loved. "I love people, and I love when they're passionate about something," says Mr. Burton. "And there is something so sad, but so endearing, when that passion is misguided." About four years ago, Mr. Burton began trying to determine whether he or Disney had the rights to the story. Disney did.

David Hoberman, president of Disney's Touchstone division, had been intrigued by Mr. Burton's film making from the time he saw one of his early shorts, Frankenweenie, a dog-as-Frankenstein story set in the suburbs. "This material was probably the closest to Tim's heart of anything he's done," Mr. Hoberman says of Nightmare. The only way Disney could lure Mr. Burton back, he said, was to give him the freedom he needed to make the movie he wanted to make." The studio was, he concedes, throwing the dice before knowing what the film would be.

Musically, Nightmare was designed to have the feel of an old threepenny opera. Mr. Elfman began his collaboration with Mr. Burton on Pee-wee's Big Adventure. But the composer says it was really their dismal sides that brought him and Mr. Burton together. "The only difference between us," says Mr. Elfman, "is that Tim's hero growing up was Vincent Price; mine was Peter Lorre." Together Mr. Elfman and Mr. Burton worked on Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman and its sequel. For Nightmare, Mr. Elfman composed the music, wrote the lyrics for the film's 11 songs and provided Jack's singing voice.

The style he sought for Nightmare was somewhere between Rodgers and Hammerstein and Gilbert and Sullivan. "I wanted to turn the clock backward and forward at the same time," says Mr. Elfman, "so that musically it feels fresh but is rooted in certain traditional styles."

From the outset, Mr. Burton wanted the visual side of Nightmare to be told with stop motion. In the technique, Mr. Burton believed he had an art form that would lend a certain power to the story. At the same time, it creates a look so unusual that he worried that it might be difficult for audiences. "There's an alienating problem with puppets. It's so different from the more traditional cel animation, where people have a perception about it, that I think it's a harder barrier to break for people."

The process is intimidating. It calls for painstaking precision, and only a few animators in the world are familiar with the technique, which requires a patience Mr. Burton says would have "put me in a nut house by now." So Mr. Selick, who has worked with the form for years, pushing the limits with the eclectic station identifications he created for MTV and several short films, was hired as the director.

Over the years, Mr. Selick had built a small group of stop-motion artists, both those who actually manipulate the puppets and those who design and make the intricate armature that lets the puppets move. The very obscure nature of stop motion insured a certain distance from the studio, as Disney had no team of in-house, stop-motion animators. And because most of the artists working in the field live in the San Francisco area, the distance became literal as well, with the production based there. In all, more than 120 artists worked on the $22 million film, far fewer than the 400 to 600 animators and artists typically employed on Disney's cel-animation projects, whose budgets run easily $10 million to $15 million more.

"What Tim gave us was a very strong, beautiful story," says Mr. Selick. "The lead characters came right from his pen. But then he let us bring it to life." The film came to life on 19 miniature sets that were wedged one after another in an old warehouse in San Francisco's South of Market district. The prop room seemed the work of a whimsical madman, with shelves bearing Jack's 700 heads variously winking, grinning, sighing.

Then there were the racks with body parts for the heroine, Sally. A rag doll stitched together by the film's evil scientist, Sally can come apart and sew herself back together again, a trick that comes in handy when she is able to distract the villain, Oogie Boogie, with an alluring bit of ankle while the rest of her rushes around behind him. Sally became one of Mr. Burton's favorite characters.

"I get so tired, especially in animated movies lately, where they try to make the woman strong," he says, "which I find paternalistic. Why not let characters be what they are and whatever strength that comes out of it is really there." Sally, he believes, is strong and at the same time very much in love with Jack. "It's nice to see a character who's in love with somebody and is not diminished by just showing that kind of emotion," he says.

Although Mr. Burton talks about Nightmare with affection, he fears that Nightmare, like the characters that fill his films, may be misunderstood. Disney executives have similar fears. "In my heart, I hope this movie is going to be a huge success," says Mr. Hoberman. "The collaboration with Tim has been a huge success, but whether people will embrace this movie is anybody's guess."