12 Days of Highly Tolerable Holiday Movies: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The third and final “Tim Burton” film in the 12 Days of Highly Tolerable Holiday Movie countdown is The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993). The guy has two favorite times of year and we all know what they are.

Jack Skellington, king of Halloweentown, discovers Christmas Town, but doesn’t quite understand the concept.

(the imdb)

Regarding just how much of a Tim Burton film it really ended up being, Mr. Selick told Sight and Sound in 1994,

It’s as though he laid the egg, and I sat on it and hatched it. He wasn’t involved in a hands-on way, but his hand is in it. It was my job to make it look like “a Tim Burton film”, which is not so different from my own films. …

… I don’t want to take away from Tim, but he was not in San Francisco when we made it. He came up five times over two years, and spent no more than eight or ten days in total.”

Be that as it may, Burton had conceived the project while still working for Disney back in 1980. It was originally a narrative poem. He began toying with the idea of making something of it. Disney agreed, and they discussed a short film like Vincent, or maybe a televised holiday special.

He shared his vision with friend Rick Heinrichs in the mid-1980’s, and the two worked up some concept art, storyboards, and even early character sculptures. By the time Burton actually had a budget for the movie from Disney, he was overextended across the board with Ed Wood and Batman Returns. He brought in his friend Mike McDowell, with whom he’d worked on Beetlejuice, but they couldn’t agree on a direction for the screenplay.

Burton reimagined the story as a musical and put together the bare bones of it with Danny Elfman’s help, also collaborating on most of the music and lyrisc. Then Caroline Thompson, who Burton worked with on Batman Returns, came in as a writer. She has also written The Addams Family, Edward Scissorhands, and Corpse Bride. Caroline first came to Tim Burton’s attention because of a short story she wrote in the early ’80’s called First Born, in which an abortion comes back to life.

Director Henry Selick said in that same Sight and Sound article where he dissed Burton, “there are very few lines of dialogue that are Caroline’s. She became busy on other films and we were constantly rewriting, reconfiguring and developing the film visually.” Okay, Henry. We get it. You did it all, buddy.

In all honesty, the guy is an artistic auteur, with the attendant talent that entails, and it probably sucks for him to have to rely on other people so much in a project. And he probably did do more than anyone else. Hence: director.

In vino lepidopteras.

The stop-motion animation was produced by a crew of over 200 animators in San Francisco, headed up by Joe Ranft and Paul Berry. The production yielded some cool new inventions, including a silent alarm that went off if a light failed to go on during a shot.

For just one second of film, up to 12 stop-motion moves had to be made. Can you imagine this being done today? When even the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is done with CGI? I feel like there is an aesthetic suffering accompanying the automated innovations in the direction that film has been heading. I can’t see a production like The Nightmare Before Christmas, with the meticulous labor and attention to craft it requires, being approved and given a budget by Disney today.

Although that’s not totally fair, since they’ve been doing that 3-D re-release thing. I guess I should not be quite so cynical about The Mouse Who Sold the World. I just really, really dislike that company.

On the other hand, sourpuss Mr. Selick is something of a dear and mercurial curmudgeon to me. He has continued working in stop-motion since The Nightmare Before Christmas, and I have a deep respect for the artistry in his body of work.

He has directed Coraline and James and the Giant Peach, and worked with Wes Anderson on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Although I find it curious that he seems to have had nothing to do with Fantastic Mr. Fox if Life Aquatic was Anderson’s first foray in to stop-motion (which, once you see Fantastic Mr. Fox, you feel like it should have been his exclusive genre all along: the static stiltedness of Anderson’s compositions, against which his wildly inventive dialogue is such a perfect foil, are absolutely born for stop-motion).

I’m guessing from the stories about the rest of Mr. Selick’s projects that they probably stopped seeing eye to eye on something and Anderson went his separate way.

Collaborator Joe Ranft, the one who headed up production in the City, the 415, the sparkly town where we leave our hearts, for The Nightmare Before Christmas, said that Selick “has a rock’n’roll meets Da Vinci temperament,” with bursts of brilliance and, occasionally, the passionate need for solitude.

Mr. Selick is presently working on an adaptation of the YA mystery-comedy Bunnicula, which makes me want to cry with joy. I only hope it is successful enough that they can do one of the sequels: The Celery Stalks At Midnight, which I have believed since I was seven years old to be the greatest pun ever written in my native tongue.

If you want more of the backstory on all this Nightmare Before Christmas production shenanigans, pick up a copy of the Frank Thompson book Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Film – The Art – The Vision, to read all about it.

All photos via the Pumpkin Patch.

Daily Batman: Heroes and Villains

by celphaneflwer on the deviantart.

Life is not simple, and people can’t be boxed into being either heroes or villains.

(Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn.)

Daily Batman: Inspiration Station — From Boudicca to Selina to Dana Scully (and Bettie in between)

Bettie Page in catsuit. Unknown date. R.I.P., Queenie.

Like Batman, the Catwoman operated outside the law within her own code of morality. She predated the creation of Alfred, the Penguin, and even famous heroines like Wonder Woman, Miss Fury, and Black Cat. Catwoman broke the glass ceiling of the comic industry and raised the bar for future female characters. From their first battle in Batman #1, the caped crusader has uniquely allowed her to escape.

Selina Kyle became a foil to Batman, a reflection of his own dark desires and need for healing, as well a Jungian anima to his animus.

(Fies, Elizabeth. “History of a Femme Fatale.” Catwoman: The Creation of a Twentieth Century Goddess. Batmedia, 2001.)

Fans of different generations of the Catwoman archetype make their own attractions to the character. Obviously she fills a void in comics of complex female characters; women that both male and female readers can relate to and admire. The largest difference between our modern mythology and the fairy tales and Greek myths of yore is the silent exclusion of half of our population.

(Fies, Elizabeth. “Feminist Role Model.” Catwoman: The Creation of a Twentieth Century Goddess. Batmedia, 2001.)

Originally comics were bought by almost as many females as males, so economics does not explain the lack of female representation in the DC universe. Unlike societies that told tales of Hera, Diana, the Amazons, Boudicca, Judith, Matilda, Cleopatra, Inana, Jinga, Queen Elizabeth, Morgan, Joan of Arc, and many other strong women, as a culture Americans lacked the archetype of the Warrior Queen.

(Fies, Elizabeth. “Feminist Role Model.” Catwoman: The Creation of a Twentieth Century Goddess. Batmedia, 2001.)

Gillian Anderson (Dana Scully, The X-Files) in purple catsuit. Jesus wept.

The invention of Catwoman begat a new generation of powerful characters like Wonder Woman, Xena, and Agent Scully that may not have been heard without Selina’s birth in 1940.

(Fies, Elizabeth. “Feminist Role Model.” Catwoman: The Creation of a Twentieth Century Goddess. Batmedia, 2001.)

Daily Batman: “We have only to follow the thread of the hero-path.”

Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero With A Thousand Faces, has this to say about the value of heroes and mythology to modern culture:

“… The logic, the heroes, and the deeds of myth survive in to modern times. In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.” (2)

“We have not even to risk the adventure alone!; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path.” (18)

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. 3rd ed. Novato: New World Library, 2008. Print.


Photographs by Daniel Van Flymen for Guapo magazine, “While Our Blood’s Still Young.” October 2009.

Daily Batman: Memento mori — or, rebel against the facts of existence

Memento mori: (lat. expr.) “Remember that you must die.”

via the infinitely worthy fuckyeahbatman on the tumblr.