Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas

This paper is a critique of Tim Burton's fantastical musical film, The Nightmare Before Christmas, released in 1993 by Touchstone Pictures. This stop-motion animation disguises a quite conventional story about conformity and keeping to the status quo as a tale of mischief, death, and destruction. One critic even argues that Jack's attempt to co-opt and transform Christmas is really a Freudian exploration of Thanatos, the death drive, an example of the way that horror stories have come to play a powerful and important role in contemporary American cinema. The film continues to draw new audiences and to build a cult following for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it is a charming musical tale about finding one's place in the world, even if that place is filled with dark images, hauntings, and frightening creatures.

Burton's previous films include the weirdly comic Beetlejuice, the very dark Batman and Batman Returns, and the strange and curious Edward Scissorhands. Danny Elfman, who here supplies much more than just the film's score, has been a frequent collaborator, and together the two have crafted another fascinating exploration of a different kind of place.

The opening number, "This is Halloween," introduces the location, Halloween Town, its inhabitants, and, at the end of the number, the film's hero, Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King. The populace has just concluded another successful year representing their personal holiday, scaring and haunting ord

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vil face first swivels into view. That power soon fades with overuse and with his reminder, "I'm only an elected official." Even Oogie Boogie, who at first is an unknown, malevolent presence in his dark, forbidden lair is eventually revealed to be little more than a sort of demented Pillsbury Doughboy, albeit one armed with sharp objects and stuffed full of vermin. His sackcloth skin takes on a reptilian sheen in one kind of lighting, but he ultimately proves not to be much of a real threat, especially once Jack returns to paying attention to his duties as reigning monarch. The film is most Disneyesque in the fact that nothing in it is truly terrifying. Every scare is accompanied by a good-natured "we don't really mean it" laugh, and no one is ever in more danger than the threat of being temporarily exploded. This is, after all, a cartoon, and no one suffers or dies when they can be simply and literally re-animated. Even in the land of evil and horror, there are limits. The Boogie Man, who is relegated to the deeper regions of the town and not allowed to spend much time actually hiding under the beds of small children, oversteps those bounds and, as a result, suffers the consequences. His punishment for trying to infli

Category: Film - T