The Nightmare Before Christmas, a stop motion animated film directed by Tim Burton, revolutionized the market for animated films when it was released. Being one of the first animated films to use a camera and puppets instead of drawn characters and sets, this one of a kind movie has become an instant classic around  Halloween and even Christmas.  It is also based off the poem of the same name written by Burton. Nightmare is a musical with songs that will never leave your head for the entire day. That is most likely because the whimsical soundtrack is composed by the legendary Danny Elfman. He has worked on many films with Tim including Beetlejuice and Corpse Bride.

The story revolves in Halloweentown, where the Pumpkin King named Jack Skellington (spoken voice by Chris Sarandon and singing voice by Danny Elfman) is tired of scaring people for all these years in the human world. Wanting something different from tricks and treats, he leaves home and stumbles across the Christmas world, Jack is sucked in so much by this land that he wants to take over Christmas that year and what the outcome is is utterly terrifying and you’d want to wish that this never happened in real life. Tagging along in the chaos is Sally (Cathrine O’Hara), a shy ragdoll who  thinks the idea of Halloween taking over Christmas is wong. To make things even worse, a sack of bugs named Oogie Boogie (Ken Page) wants to make Santa  his lunch. With these two holidays colliding in such a bizarre yet interesting way, this is an original idea at it’s finest.

The film  was released in 1993 and since has become one of the classic Disney movies (since Disney owns the franchise), also earning a video game spin off Oogie’s Revenge and two seasonal rides around Christmas and Halloween. Haunted Mansion Holiday takes the beloved characters of Nightmare and lets them take over the Haunted Mansion  attraction in time for the holidays (only at Tokyo Disney and Disneyland in California).

Now, onto the making of the movie. For an hour and sixteen minute movie, it took three years to make in stop-motion. Each second of film took about twelve frames each and when you think about how it took three years to do this, that is a ton of hours. All together, there were 227 puppets made for the film and at the time, the mechanical skeletons in most of the puppets were ground-breaking technology. They couldn’t just make a new puppet every time a character needed a new frame, so they created different heads. Sally was easily the trickiest to animate because of her facial expressions and her hair. Animators had tried to use real hair, but ended up using stagnant hair that went straight down her back. That was because animators didn’t create multiple heads to change. Instead, they made faces. This process made it easier for animation to run smoothly. There were over 100 sets used for the film and there were trap doors that the animators could open up in the center of the set to move puppets easier. The sets of Halloweentown was so large that animators had to break it up in sections and put them in different sound stages.The people that worked on the film must have made sure everything was right, because if there was even one hiccup, they would have had to film the entire movie again. That takes dedication.

I was scared of this movie as a child, but when I was about thirteen, I had gotten interested into Tim Burton’s art style. As you may have guessed, TNBC was the first Tim Burton film I watched and soon, I was reciting every line of dialogue and lyric from start to finish. The story and the characters I could connect and relate to and it’s easy to get hooked on the songs to where at one point I had bought the soundtrack. To this day, this remain one of my favorite movies to watch when it comes on TV around the Halloween season and it’s most likely one of my all-time-favorite films of all time.  With a spooky but fun premise and franchise, The Nightmare Before Christmas has been a favorite among families for almost 25 years now with its unique design and cast of characters.