AMAZING WHAT YOU CAN DO IN A FORTNIGHT

By Quentin Curtis

From The Independent (London), 11.27.1994

Hollywood is all for originality, so long as it's tried and tested. In a town of formula hits, Tim Burton is a one-off. There have been raised eyebrows about the title of his animated movie, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (PG) - especially since Burton only produced the film, and was present for little more than a fortnight of its meticulous two-year shoot. And yet you have only to look at the six-minute animated short that comes with it, Vincent (U), Burton's first film, to see that this Nightmare owes more to one man's bad dreams than to all Disney's fantasies. The story of a boy who wants to grow up to be Vincent Price (who provides the narration), Vincent spindily embodies every feature of Burton's Nightmare style - its spidery drawing, macabre humour and tongue-in-cheek horror. It is Charles Addams with a Poe face.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (based on a children's book by Burton, now in Puffin at pounds 4.99) has the simplicity of fairy tale - albeit with a shading of Grimm. Jack Skellington, the bat bow-tied lord of Hallowe'en Land, whose pin-striped limbs resemble elongated matchsticks, is lonesome and bored. A post-coital tristesse seems to have set in, as the film opens on the day after Hallowe'en - his most successful (ie. most horrible) ever. Moping around the forest, he stumbles upon a Christmas-tree- shaped door in a tree. A few skeletal steps later, after being sucked into a whirling blue vortex of twinkling stars, he is in Christmas-land. Not content with tourism, he usurps Santa Claus, making for a Christmas that is more macabre than merry.

The use of stop-motion animation (more often seen in special- effects extravaganzas) makes for a three-dimensional world, of puppets and sets, more expressive than cartoon drawings. In the film's beguiling opening scene, an introduction to the world of Hallowe'en set to song, director Henry Selick's camera swoops and swirls, as if it were on loan from Brian De Palma. There are grotesque wonders here: an expressionistically slanted graveyard of chilly-grey, crooked tombstones; a chorus of skeletons jiving in unison along the branches of a walking tree; the shadow of a bogeyman over the smooth gold disc of the moon, smiling, to allow his teeth, a flock of bats, to flutter away. This scene leads into Jack's lonely walk on a moon-drenched promontory (''O there's an empty place in my bones / That calls for something unknown''), which, along with his flight with emaciated reindeer over a patchwork quilt of snow-covered houses, provides the movie's most striking image.

All this is magical - but not quite pure magic. The charm is rather calculated. There is a scene where Jack does an experiment on a bauble to discover the secret of Christmas, and the film sometimes seems to have been created in the same suspect spirit, applying science to myth. Burton and screenwriter Caroline Thompson have flirted with this danger before, in Edward Scissorhands (with its references to Beauty and the Beast et al), but there they seduced us. The Nightmare Before Christmas doesn't have the same dramatic sweep, and its references are often more opportunistic than enlightening. The love interest is provided by Sally - a gorgeous doe- eyed doll, of the sewn-together, Frankenstein type. She pines for Jack, while languishing locked-up in the laboratory of the wicked professor who invented her. She clearly carries a lot of mythical baggage. But it is merely a fashion accessory.

There is also a scene in which Santa is tortured on a roulette table by a figure called Oogie Boogie, a great pea-green sack, voiced by the black actor Ken Page, which the PC may find offensive, and the rest of us plain crass. But these are quibbles in a film that by and large gives Hollywood craftsmanship a good name. It is beautifully detailed (worth seeing more than once), elegantly scored by Danny Elfman (who also sings Jack's numbers), and stamped throughout with the vision of Tim Burton.