Give "The Nightmare Before Christmas" Another Chance

Is there a place in pop culture for a children’s film about death and existential crises?
I hope so. Because a children’s film about death and existential crises is my favorite movie of all time.

At its most essential, Tim Burton and Henry Selick’s incredible “The Nightmare Before Christmas”  is about just that.

The protagonist, Jack Skellington (a skeleton), has become disillusioned with his life. Sure, he’s the most popular guy in Halloween Town, but (to borrow from another Disney protagonist) there must be more than this provincial life.

His angst-ridden midnight wanderings lead him to Christmas Town, where he decides that a little holiday spirit is the answer. However, after a failed hijacking, Jack comes to realize that being ghoulish is what he’s really good at. He didn’t need a drastic life change — he just needed a little perspective.

Unlike most children’s movies, the message of the movie isn’t overt.

Don’t kidnap Santa?

Don’t confuse boa constrictors with Christmas wreaths?

Don’t trust a man who is quite obviously a burlap sack full of insects?

The lack of a moral, however, isn’t that disturbing (or obvious) at the movie’s end. Other children’s movies are often large teaching tools for social norms, but “Nightmare” bypasses such things, focusing instead on spectacle of the film itself, the incredibly refreshing premise.

Kids can tell when we pander to them, and there’s no pandering in this movie. The themes, music, characterization, imagery and dialogue are all complex — often too complex for kids to understand. When I was a kid, though, that didn’t bother me. It intrigued me.

As I’ve aged, the film has aged with me. The more I watch it, the fuller it becomes.
The score, for example, is some of composer Danny Elfman’s best work. It could stand alone as a strange little musical (and should really be on Broadway). The songs the characters sing are perfectly suited to the movie, with none of the syrup of other animated musicals. Elfman seamlessly weaves spooky, minor, organ-led Halloween motifs with familiar Christmas sounds to make a score like nothing I’ve heard since.

Particularly excellent are Skellington’s songs, in which he gives Hamlet-like soliloquies. “Spoiled all, spoiled all,” he moans in “Poor Jack.” “Find a deep cave to hide in, in a million years they’ll find me, only dust...” Pretty heavy stuff for a kid’s movie.

The clay animation is just as entrancing. Sally, Jack’s (subversively feminist, as I’ve realized) love interest, is a rag doll version of Frankenstein’s monster. To escape from her abusive creator, she simply throws herself out a window and sews herself back together when she lands. The symbolism is dark and genius.

Oogie Boogie, the film’s bad guy (voiced expertly by Broadway vet Ken Page), is made of the thousands of writhing bugs he eats for dinner — a literal version of the old adage “you are what you eat.”

Curled hills unroll as characters walk on them. Gothic buildings teeter on spindly foundations. Halloween Town is a nightmarish version of Oz, where everything is wondrous and nonsensical, but in a decidedly goth way. It’s a damned masterpiece.

“Nightmare” isn’t for everyone. I shudder at its association with Hot Topic-loving middle-schoolers, an association I suspect has irreparably sullied the film’s good name.
But, even if it traumatized you as a kid, I implore you: give it a chance. It is, in my opinion, the best (and most creative) animated film ever made.

It speaks to all of the weird kids out there, who weren’t quite satisfied with the perfectly packaged Disney offerings, who longed for something that addressed the darker side of life, who were intrigued by all the things that were supposed to be wrong and scary. It’s a movie for the kids who were always too curious for their own good, kids who’ve grown up into adults that still ask too many questions.

But, more than anything, it’s a film for people who appreciate beauty, even if it’s dark. Sometimes, as Skellington himself finds, the most beautiful things are.