10 / 10
Made by Hand
The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of the most beautiful films ever made by hand. Every frame was built, lit and moved by a team of animators working a fraction of an inch at a time, and the result is a world that looks as if it could exist on a shelf: Halloween Town in blacks, greys and sickly greens, Christmas Town glowing in reds and golds, and a skeleton in a pinstripe suit wandering between them.
Henry Selick directed it, from a story and characters created by Tim Burton, who produced it. It’s often called Tim Burton’s film, and his name is in the title, but Selick and his crew made it, over three years, in a studio in San Francisco. It came out in 1993, did well without being a smash, and became a phenomenon on video. It’s a 10.
It’s also only seventy-six minutes long, and it doesn’t waste a second. There’s no filler song and no scene that exists only to sell toys. Everything moves the story forward, and the songs do the work that pages of dialogue would do in another film, carrying character, plot and feeling all at once. It’s a model of economy for any storyteller.
A Poem at Disney
The story began as a three-page poem Tim Burton wrote in the early eighties, when he was a young animator at Disney, imagining what would happen if the leader of Halloween discovered Christmas. He drew designs for Jack and his ghost dog Zero, and pitched it as a short film or a television special.
Disney held the rights for years without doing anything with them. The studio thought it was too strange and too dark. After Burton became famous with Beetlejuice and Batman, the studio finally agreed to make it, and Burton brought in Selick, who had worked with him at Disney and was one of the finest stop-motion animators in the world.
Even then, Disney released it under its Touchstone label, worried the Disney name would lead parents to expect something gentler. Years later, it embraced the film completely, but at the time the studio’s caution says a great deal about how unusual the project was: a stop-motion musical about a skeleton, from a studio that had spent sixty years perfecting hand-drawn princesses.
The Pumpkin King
Jack Skellington is the most celebrated figure in Halloween Town. Every year he organises the holiday, and every year he terrifies the world, and the townsfolk worship him for it. The film opens on the night after another triumphant Halloween, with a big musical number, This Is Halloween, introducing the whole town: vampires, witches, a werewolf, a clown with a tear-away face and a mayor with two faces.
Then Jack walks away from the celebration, alone, into a graveyard at night, and sings Jack’s Lament. He’s the best at what he does, everyone loves him for it, and he’s empty. He’s tired of the same screams, the same scares, the same year after year. It’s a song about a successful man who has lost his purpose, and it’s one of the best things Danny Elfman ever wrote.
Chris Sarandon provides Jack’s speaking voice, and Elfman sings for him. The combination gives Jack a warmth and melancholy that makes him instantly sympathetic, even though he’s a skeleton whose job is terror. Elfman has said he felt a kinship with Jack, a performer tired of his own act, and you can hear that in every note.
For Writers
Jack’s Lament shows a hero at the top of his world who feels empty. The film’s conflict begins inside him, not with any villain.
When you write a successful character, the temptation is to find their problem outside them. Often the more interesting problem is that success has stopped meaning anything.
Open with your character achieving exactly what they’ve always done, and show the moment they realise it no longer satisfies them. Let that dissatisfaction drive the plot.
What’s This?
Wandering in the woods, Jack finds a circle of trees, each with a door carved into it shaped like a holiday symbol: a heart, an egg, a turkey, a Christmas tree. He opens the Christmas door, falls through, and lands in the snow of Christmas Town. The other doors, for Easter, Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day, are never opened, and fans have been imagining what lies behind them for thirty years.
The film explodes into colour. The sequence of Jack running through the town, marvelling at the lights, presents, snowball fights and happy children, singing What’s This?, is pure joy, and the animation is breathtaking: snow falling in the lamplight, lights glowing on every roof, Jack’s thin body bending and stretching in delight.
It’s the moment the film earns its title. Jack has found something that makes him feel alive again, and the audience, who have spent twenty minutes in grey and black, feel it with him. It’s one of the great uses of colour in animation, held back deliberately so that its arrival is overwhelming.
Understanding Christmas
Jack brings Christmas back to Halloween Town and tries to explain it to the townsfolk, and they don’t understand. They take everything he shows them as a frightening version of something they already know. So Jack locks himself in his tower and tries to understand Christmas scientifically, dissecting a teddy bear, testing ornaments and studying a snowflake under a microscope.
He can’t find the magic, so he decides that he doesn’t need to understand it. He’ll simply take it over. He announces that this year, Halloween Town will do Christmas, and he, Jack, will be Sandy Claws. The whole town throws itself into the project with ghoulish enthusiasm, and Jack, delighted, doesn’t see any of the warning signs.
It’s a lovely comic sequence and a sharp one. Jack loves Christmas and has no idea what it’s for. He sees the outward forms, the presents, the lights, the red suit, and misses the point entirely. The townsfolk, eager to please him, set about building Christmas presents in their own style, and the results are exactly what you’d expect from a town of monsters.
For Writers
Jack studies Christmas like a scientist and still misses the point. He copies every outward form and never understands what the holiday is for.
When you write a character who misunderstands something, the comedy and the tragedy come from how close they get while still getting it wrong.
Give your character accurate knowledge of every surface detail of the thing they want, and let them miss its meaning entirely. Show the gap through their mistakes.
Sally
Sally is a rag doll stitched together by the mad scientist Dr. Finkelstein, who keeps her locked in his tower. She poisons him with deadly nightshade in his soup to escape, repeatedly, and he stitches her back together when she falls apart. She’s in love with Jack from the start, and he barely notices her.
She’s also the only person in Halloween Town who sees that Jack’s plan is a mistake. She has a vision of a Christmas tree bursting into flames, and she tries to warn him, and nobody listens. Catherine O’Hara gives her a gentle, sad voice, and Sally’s Song, sung on a hill at night as she pulls the petals from a flower, is the quiet centre of the film.
She’s the film’s conscience, and she’s a remarkable heroine for a musical: not a princess, not a prize, but a stitched-together outsider who can see what others can’t and who finally acts to save Jack from himself, sneaking into Oogie Boogie’s lair to rescue Santa while Jack is away. She’s braver than anyone else in the film, and she never asks for credit.
For Writers
Sally sees that Jack’s plan will fail, warns him, and is ignored. Her quiet foresight makes the disaster that follows feel inevitable.
When you write a well-meaning mistake, the reader forgives it more easily if someone saw it coming. The warning makes the error human, not stupid.
Before your character’s big mistake, have one character warn them clearly. Let the warning be ignored for understandable reasons, and remember it at the moment of disaster.
Oogie Boogie
Jack sends three trick-or-treating children, Lock, Shock and Barrel, to kidnap Santa Claus, so that Jack can take his place. They deliver Santa to their master instead: Oogie Boogie, a sack of bugs who gambles with dice in a lair full of torture devices and wants to cook Santa in his cauldron.
His song, Oogie Boogie’s Song, sung under black light in a neon casino of dangers, is the most purely fun sequence in the film, and Ken Page performs it with a lounge singer’s swagger. His end, when Jack pulls the loose thread on his sack and the bugs pour out, is gross and very satisfying.
Lock, Shock and Barrel get their own song, Kidnap the Sandy Claws, a cheerful little number about the many ways they could torture Santa. It’s one of the film’s funniest moments, and it’s typical of its tone: macabre and sweet at the same time. The three of them bicker, scheme and get everything slightly wrong, and they’re the closest thing the film has to naughty children, which is exactly what they are.
The Christmas Disaster
Christmas Eve arrives, and Jack sets off in a coffin-shaped sleigh pulled by skeletal reindeer, guided through the fog by Zero’s glowing nose. The presents he delivers were made by the townsfolk of Halloween Town: shrunken heads, snakes that swallow Christmas trees, a killer duck and a vampire teddy bear. Children scream. Parents call the police.
The army is sent up, the sleigh is shot down, and Jack lands in a cemetery, in the arms of a stone angel, beaten and humiliated. Then, alone, he realises what he’s done, and what he actually loves. He’s the Pumpkin King, and he’s good at it, and he wants to go home.
It’s a surprisingly wise ending for a family film. Jack doesn’t learn to be someone else. He learns, by failing at being someone else, what he’s good at and why it matters. He returns home, rescues Santa from Oogie Boogie, and finally notices Sally, and the film ends with the two of them on a hill in the moonlight, snow falling on Halloween Town for the first time.
Zero and the Mayor
Jack’s ghost dog Zero, with a glowing jack-o’-lantern nose, doesn’t have a word of dialogue and nearly steals the film. He follows Jack everywhere, fetches bones and floats through walls, and when the fog is too thick for the sleigh, his nose lights the way. It’s a direct nod to Rudolph, and it’s the kind of detail that makes the film feel handmade and loved.
Halloween Town’s mayor has two faces, one smiling and one terrified, and his head spins between them depending on his mood. Glenn Shadix gives him a nervous, wheedling voice, and he’s the perfect picture of a politician who depends entirely on one popular figure. When Jack goes missing, he falls apart completely.
How It Was Made
Selick led a team of more than a hundred people, including animators, sculptors, set builders and costume makers. Each second of film required twenty-four separate frames, and a good animator could manage about a minute of finished footage a week. The sets were built with real depth and lit like a live-action film.
Jack had hundreds of interchangeable heads, each with a slightly different expression, swapped between frames to make him speak and emote. The effect is seamless, and it gives him a range of feeling no puppet had had before. Every snowflake, every flickering candle and every strand of Sally’s hair was placed by hand, and you can feel it in every frame.
The Disney Distance
Disney was nervous about the film, and it showed in the release. It came out under the Touchstone label, and it did well but not spectacularly at the box office. It built its reputation on video, where children, and adults, watched it over and over, learning the songs and quoting the lines.
By the 2000s it had become one of Disney’s most valuable properties. The studio reissued it in 3D in 2006 and put its own name back on it, and Disneyland dresses the Haunted Mansion in Nightmare decorations every autumn. The film Disney was afraid of has become a pillar of its holiday merchandising, and Jack’s face is on everything from backpacks to wedding cakes.
There’s also a long-running argument about whether it’s a Halloween film or a Christmas film. The answer is both, and the film was built to be both. It opens in one holiday and ends in the other, and its whole story is what happens when they collide. It belongs to the whole stretch from October to December, and it’s watched in both months in millions of homes.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The Nightmare Before Christmas gives its hero a good motive for a terrible plan. Jack isn’t trying to ruin Christmas. He loves it, and he’s so sure he understands it that he never asks anyone.
When you write a well-meaning character who causes a disaster, the danger is that the reader stops sympathising. The key is making the love obvious and the blind spot understandable.
Show your character’s enthusiasm in full before the mistake, then let one person warn them clearly. The reader will forgive the error if they saw the good intention and the ignored warning.
Is The Nightmare Before Christmas worth watching?
Yes. It’s a 10. It’s short, beautiful, funny and slightly sad, the songs are wonderful, and every frame was made by hand. Watch it in October or December, or both, and watch it with anyone who has ever felt out of place in their own life.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists