The moral of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas? Just because you're the master of one thing, it doesn't follow that your skills and perspectives are easily transferable to something else. In the 1993 Tim Burton production, directed by Henry Selick, the Pumpkin King of Halloween decides he wants to play Santa Claus. The results are disastrous. At every turn, the Pumpkin King and his monstrous minions have misunderstood everything. They sort of get the form of Santa's nocturnal sleigh ride and his bundles of goodies, but utterly fail to grasp the ethos.
Gorgeously rendered in stop-motion animation, the spectral Halloween Town the Pumpkin King knows so well is populated by an imaginative panoply of spooks. There is a politician with two faces, the clown “with the tear-away face,” unseen ghouls under beds and stairs and a Boogie Man who performs like an evil Cab Calloway. The perverse Dr. Frankenweenie has an unwholesome eye for his stitched-together creation, the somehow good-hearted Sally. Nightmare Before Christmas is also a musical, with marvelous songs written by longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman as if Stephen Sondheim fell under Edward Gorey's spell.
The new release features a Blu-ray 3D disc, a regular Blue-ray disc, a DVD and a digital download as the industry struggles to figure out what comes next in delivery systems.
