From Rugrats to The Simpsons, at some point in our lives we’ve devoted time to watching cartoons. Whether you have been depriving your inner child of animation for who-knows-how long or are an active Disney/Nickelodeon/Comic Strip-phile like I am, this is an inside look into something you may not know about animation. Enjoy this free issue of the Toon Times.
Lights go out suddenly and the sound of shattering glass echoes through the descending elevator filled with people standing close enough to feel each other breathing. You might expect that these people, trapped in a small room under these circumstances, would scream and run around, elbowing neighbors as they search for a way out. But this is no ordinary venue, no ordinary circumstance. This is Haunted Mansion Holiday, The Nightmare Before Christmas adaptation of Disneyland’s the Haunted Mansion, and somehow there’s more glee in the air than fright.
This sort of tension, of fun over fear, is something that follows The Nightmare Before Christmas everywhere. From Haunted Mansion Holiday to the Disney Store down the street selling Jack Skellington plushies, there is something fundamentally pleasant about the film – and it finds its roots in Tim Burton’s unique character and history. Despite being a horror extraordinaire and champion of the macabre, Burton (along with his collaborators) has continuously found beauty in the morbid, taking a page from traditional and stop-motion animation and making it an entirely restored and beloved medium.
“What’s This?” – Tim Burton, a man with many influences
In the 1980s, after graduating from the California Institute of the Arts (also known as CalArts), Burton began working at the Walt Disney Animation Studios. As a budding young animator, he worked in several departments of the studios, trading off between animation, concept art, and storyboard art for films like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. While at Disney, Burton created a stop-motion short, Vincent, about a little boy who dreams that he is Vincent Price, an actor known for his work in kitschy horror films of the 1950s and 60s.
A child of the 60s, Burton grew up in the heyday of Rankin/Bass animation. The stop-motion Christmas movies we now know so well from ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas specials became a staple of Christmas television as early as 1964 with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, a story based on the well known carol written by Johnny Marks. As Burton recalls, this film (along with How the Grinch Stole Christmas) were among his favorite holiday specials. This interest would eventually culminate in a project that would be one of the masterpieces of Burton’s career.
“This is Halloween” (and Christmas)
After the success of Vincent in 1982, Disney agreed to work with Burton on a project he’d titled The Nightmare Before Christmas. Originally a three-page poem produced along with animations, The Nightmare Before Christmas told the story of Jack, “a skeleton sat alone upon a hill” who, upon finding a set of trees in a wood with carved doors, would leave Halloweenland (as it was called in the poem) to visit a place called Christmas Town and come back with infinite goals of yuletide cheer for his scary hometown.
Nearly a decade after creating the poem, Burton began a collaboration with Disney on a feature length project based on his original tale. Already a successful filmmaker with movies like Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands under his belt and busy with another film, Burton decided not to take on the project single-handedly. In his stead as director was Henry Selick, a colleague of Burton’s from CalArts.
Selick took on The Nightmare Before Christmas with the constant thought of its creator. Burton’s sketches were used in the realization of many of the most important characters of the film, not least of them being Jack Skellington himself. The style of the film, adapted from Burton’s drawings and the motifs of his previous works, including Vincent, was described by Selick as “German expressionist combined with Dr. Suess.”
The film that would be created out of this world from the mind of Tim Burton would become his first step into the world of animation after his stint as a traditional Disney animator. But despite its depiction of a world filled with the macabre, there is something inherently sweet about The Nightmare Before Christmas.
“Jack’s Lament” is also his success
Tim Burton as a film auteur has found success in The Nightmare Before Christmas and otherwise, for two major reasons. The first is his passion for making the unusual palatable. The second is his devotion to character.
As early as his first short (Vincent), it was clear Burton was not one for traditional hero and heroine, all’s-well-that-ends-well animated film. Though he’d trained at CalArts under some of the most prestigious Disney animators, and been taken in as a protégé-of-sorts under the wing of the collective Disney Animation group, his devotion was to a more subtly sinister, as well as comedic, narrative. Even in his earlier, non-animated works such as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Burton puts his main character through scenes from the gently comedic (like his Rube Goldberg breakfast scene) to the more frighteningly funny (as in the Large Marge ghost story scene). This dichotomy draws audiences to his movies from multiple sides of the film-going spectrum, from those interested in the light-hearted to those who prefer the “not-for-the-fainthearted.”
In his book of poems, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, published in 1997, Burton tells stories that make readers laugh and cry, at times simultaneously. From an oyster boy who is eventually consumed by his parents to a voodoo doll who can’t hug anyone lest she be pierced through with pins, Burton’s odd affinity for the strange is well-suited to comedic and often times compassionate storytelling. And the way he incites this compassion is through his characters, one of whom – Jack Skellington – is exactly that spirit personified.
Jack, while an un-cuddly skeleton-man on the outside, is a tortured and caring soul on the inside. And though the imagery of eyeball-less skulls and bat-winged bowties might appeal to one audience, the nature of Jack Skellington, the man dying to take Christmas home with him, is what keeps both sides of movie-goers passionate about what might have been a film for a much smaller audience.
“Jack’s Obsession” and ours too
The universality of The Nightmare Before Christmas is in Burton’s perfect combination of the unusual and the perfectly human.
One concept we might not all understand is the desire to dress all in black, or the penchant for odd shapes and weirdly contorted faces. While we can appreciate these aspects as being eccentricity at its best and least contrived, if not for the storytelling behind the masks of the Halloween Town characters, perhaps The Nightmare Before Christmas would not be the treasured animated film that it is today.
Yet because of Tim Burton’s history – his taste for not only the bizarre, but also the traditional notion of Christmas and animation – the world has been made to love a film that they might not have otherwise believed they could.
And if success of the film was not enough to prove this breaking of the norms of animation and audience expectation, then the institution that is Jack Skellington’s persona at the Disney theme parks and Disney stores is more than enough to prove that the pleasant can coexist with the weird, if not only to humanize it, then to make it all the more awe-inspiring.