Nightmare before Christmas It’s one of the most legendary films of this time of year. Directed by Henry Selick, this feature film stop the movement It premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 9, 1993 and achieved great commercial and critical success. What many don’t know is that the story of Jack Skeleton, considered today a cult film, finds its origins in a short text that Tim Burton wrote a few years earlier.
It was in 1982 that the director, then He worked for Disney as an animator and designer.wrote a poem called The Nightmare Before Christmas. “It was an autumn afternoon in Halloween Land / and the air was freezing everything / In the moonlight, a skeleton / sat alone on top of the mountain / He was tall and thin, with a bat in a tie / Jack Skellington was his name / he was tired and bored in Halloween Land / where everything was always the same,” the text begins.
Throughout the poem, Burton created the entire imagination of the fictional world which, ten years later, became the animated film we all know. As the filmmaker later explained, the biggest influence he had while writing this three-page text was TV Christmas specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer And How the Grinch Stole Christmas!created by Chuck Jones in 1966.
Even though it was his idea, the director of Beetle juice (1988) and Edward Scissorhands (1990) were unable to take the lead in Nightmare before Christmas because, by the time Disney approved the film’s development, it was already in the hands of another project. More precisely, of Batman returns (1992), the feature film with Michael Keaton (Batman) and Michelle Pfeiffer (Catwoman).
“It’s like Burton laid the egg, and I sat on it and incubated it. He wasn’t directly involved, but his hand is there. My job was to make it look like “a Tim Burton movie”, which is not that different from my own films,” said Selick, the film’s current director.
Other animated films by Tim Burton
Although Tim Burton did not direct Nightmare before Christmas, Yes, he has directed other great animated films. This is the case of The corpse bride (2005), one of the representatives of Burton’s gothic cinema and the animation technique of stop the movement. It took the team approximately 55 weeks to bring to life the characters and different locations that appear in the film.
In 2012 it was created Frankenweenie, one of Burton’s most special films, since it is a remake of the short film he released of the same name in 1984. The film, the first in black and white recorded with the technique of stop the movement and released in IMAX 3D format, is a parody of the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
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