The Nightmare Before Christmas
Released in theaters on October 13, 1993
Stream on Disney+
Runtime: 1 Hour 19 Minutes
Rated PG
Jack Skellington is the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town and the scariest ghoul the Halloween season has ever known! This has earned him fame and a position of leadership amongst his fellow monsters who live in Halloween Town. However, Jack has become tired of scare after scare each Halloween. He longs for something more meaningful and different. After a long walk, he stumbles upon a door to Christmas Town. What follows next can only be described as holiday chaos as Santa is kidnapped and the creatures of Halloween Town take over the Christmas Holiday!
Themes:
Thankfulness, citizenship, kidnapping, Christmas, Halloween, monsters, ghosts, premonitions, friendships, holiday traditions, failing, improving on an idea, the scientific method, stealing, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, trick-or-treating, good intentions gone bad, scaring, being different, mad scientists, creating life, asking questions (What’s this?!?!), gambling, eating bugs, and supporting others.
Language:
The worse that you will hear is during a song where Jack says “by God” and “what the heck.” There is some “scary monster lingo” for lack of a better term. I’ll touch on it in the next section.
Stuff to be aware of:
Santa gets kidnapped by three kids dressed in Halloween costumes, a character on fire jumps in a fountain, little skeletons can be seen being hung by a noose from a tree’s branches, there are several scary monsters such as one hiding under the bed with sharp teeth and eyes glowing red! Sally falls from a window and loses limbs that she then sews back on. You see a wheelchair bound mad scientist open his head and scratch his brain. He later takes part of his brain out and puts it into his Frankenstein like creation.
One of the vampires pulls his eye out. It is attached to a cord and pops back into place when he lets go of it. Sally puts something in the soup she makes that will make anyone that eats it fall asleep. There are shrunken heads that are seen as toys and the Christmas toys the monsters make chase and scare children. All of this has a major “Tim Burton” feel to it.
Here are a few “monster” things characters in the movie say: a dead rat, a head I found in the lake, you poisoned me, hope he isn’t dead, chop him into bits, and you made wounds ooze and flesh crawl. These are are mostly for humor or for rhyming in song.
Overall:
By this time you either love this movie or hate it. This is one of Tim Burton’s best stop motion animation movies, in my opinion. The songs are catchy and the story is so different than anything else ever made. It can be a little on the creepy side, I wouldn’t say scary. It is because of this that I believe Disney originally released this under it’s Touchstone company instead of the Disney brand. Since then, they have embraced it and Jack, Sally, and Oogie Boogie are all staples of Halloween and Christmas in the Disney parks. I have loved this one since I was a kid and was excited to show my own children.
The film itself looks pretty good after all these years, but if you look at more modern stop motion like The Corpse Bride and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio it looks a little dated. This isn’t because of the stop motion, just the quality of the film. It would be very cool for them to take the original voice work and apply it to new Stop Motion. Update it a little. Don’t change anything, just film it again with new stop motion.