The Nightmare Before Christmas is an American stop motion dark fantasy musical film produced and conceived by Tim Burton. It tells the story of Jack Skellington, a character from "Halloween Town" who opens a portal to "Christmas Town" and decides to celebrate the holiday, with some dastardly and comical consequences. Danny Elfman wrote the film score and provided the singing voice of Jack, as well as some minor characters. The remaining principal voice cast includes Chris Sarandon, Catherine O'Hara, William Hickey, Ken Page, Paul Reubens and Glenn Shadix.
The Nightmare Before Christmas originated in a poem written by Tim Burton in 1982, while he was working as an animator at Walt Disney Feature Animation. The Walt Disney Studios started to consider developing it as either a short film or 30-minute television special. Over the years, Burton's thoughts regularly returned to the project, and in 1990, he made a development deal with Disney. Production started in 1991 in San Francisco. Disney released the film through the Touchstone Pictures banner because the studio believed the film would be "too dark, and scary for kids."
The film was met with both critical and financial success. The film has since been reissued by Walt Disney Pictures and re-released annually in the Disney Digital 3-D format from 2006 until 2009, making it the first stop-motion animated feature to be entirely converted to 3D.
Plot
The story starts in a forest with seven trees containing doors leading to towns representing various holidays: Fourth of July, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas, and Halloween. Halloween Town is a fantasy world filled with citizens such as deformed monsters, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, vampires, werewolves and witches. Jack Skellington, a skeleton known as The Pumpkin King, leads them in organizing the annual Halloween holiday. However, in a monologue, Jack reveals he has grown tired of the same routine year after year.
Wandering dejectedly in the woods, he stumbles across the seven holiday doors and accidentally opens a portal to Christmas Town, whose residents are charged with organizing the annual Christmas holiday, under the guidance of Santa Claus.
Impressed by the feeling and style of Christmas, Jack presents his findings and his understanding of Christmas, to the Halloween Town residents. They fail to grasp his meaning and compare everything to their idea of Halloween, although there is one Christmas character they can relate to: a fearsome lobster-like king who flies at night, named "Sandy Claws". Meanwhile, Jack barely understands Christmas himself, obsessively tries to study the holiday but ultimately decides that since he cannot understand it, he should improve it, and announces that they will take over Christmas this year.
Jack's obsession with Christmas leads him to usurp the role of Santa. Every resident is assigned a task, while Sally, a beautiful rag doll woman created by the town's mad scientist, starts falling in love with Jack. However, after a vision of a burning Christmas tree, she alone fears that his plans to run Christmas will become disastrous, but has no luck convincing him. Jack assigns Lock, Shock and Barrel, a trio of mischievous children, to abduct Santa and bring him back to Halloween Town. Against Jack's wishes and largely for their amusement, the trio deliver Santa to Oogie Boogie, a gambling-addict bogeyman who plots to play a game with Santa's life at stake.
Christmas Eve arrives and Sally attempts to stop Jack with fog, but it fails to do so thanks to Jack's ghost dog Zero and his glowing nose and this allows Jack to embark into the sky on a coffin-like sleigh pulled by skeletal reindeer, guided by Zero. Down on the ground, Sally prays that her premonition does not come true. He begins to deliver presents to children around the world, but the gifts (shrunken heads, Christmas tree-eating snakes, pumpkin jack-in-the-boxes, vampire teddy bears, toy ducks with sharp teeth, living wreaths, etc.) only terrify the recipients. The children alert their parents who call the police who call the military. The air raid siren is activated and Jack is spotted with search lights, after which he is then shot at by air raid artillery cannons. One of the cannons eventually shoots the sleigh dead-on and causes it to crash and Jack is presumed dead by Halloween Town's citizens, but in fact he has survived the crash, landing in a cemetery.
Although he is depressed by the failure of his plan, he quickly regains his old spirit, having come up with new ideas for next Halloween. He then rushes back home to rescue Santa and put things right. Meanwhile, Sally attempts to free Santa, but is captured by Oogie. Jack slips into the lair and frees them, then angrily confronts Oogie. Almost immediately, Oogie springs a surprise trap on Jack (whom he easily avoids) and is about to escape, when Jack pulls one of Oogie's loose threads, revealing him to be nothing more than a collection of snakes and insects, which are all incinerated, save for the last one, which Santa squashes with his boot. Jack apologizes to Santa for the mess he made, and Santa, while still angry at Jack, assures him that he can fix things, and leaves to deliver the right presents to the world's children.
After Jack returns to Halloween Town, the townspeople celebrate that he's alive, and Santa, after fixing Christmas, returns and makes snow fall over Halloween Town in reconciliation between himself and Jack. The townspeople are confused by the snow at first, but soon begin to play happily in it, finally realizing what Christmas is about. Jack spies Sally heading to the graveyard and follows her. Atop the graveyard's big hill, Jack admits that he reciprocates Sally's romantic feelings for him and they declare their new found love and embrace on the hill.
********************************************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment