The Nightmare Before Christmas: A Timeless Masterpiece of Movie Design

It’s now December and a time when I start thinking about the design of Christmas movies. I’ve reviewed other Christmas classics including Home Alone, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and (the uncanny-valley movie), The Polar Express. 

This year I want to explore the design of the movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas. 

Image from cinema.de

The first thing to know, if you’ve never seen this movie, is that you need to see this movie. It’s great. There are some deep themes addressed, catchy songs, and beautiful characters and sets - in a weird but intriguing way.  

It’s also most definitely a Christmas movie, but debating that with someone who disagrees with you and thinks it firmly belongs to Halloween is still fun 30 years later, since the release date back in 1993. 

Stop-Motion Animation 

The second thing to know, if you’ve never seen this movie, is that it is 100% stop-motion animation. The creators made more than 200 physical models for the various characters and scenes. They would then photograph thousands of individual, still images of the various characters positioned in discrete poses and orientations meticulously defined for a particular action or motion. 

Behind the Scenes of the set for The Nightmare Before Christmas, Image from aintitcool.com

Stitching these still-frame images together and showing them rapidly in succession, would bring the character to life, thereby revealing the intended character motion. These actions are all the more impressive because the models didn’t contain the robotic actuators and other electronics that other movies have used to derive non-human character motion. Around a decade earlier, Star Wars used stop-motion animation for the same reason. It was likely cheaper and easier to manipulate models of AT-AT Walkers (on the planet Hoth) than to build an entire functioning robot. 

Stop-motion of AT-AT. Image from popularmechanics.com

In The Nightmare Before Christmas, the artists would slowly but surely develop the movie frame by frame over countless weeks taking tens of thousands of pictures. During their most productive weeks, the team would only generate 70 seconds of the final movie per week! At 24 frames per second, and a run time of 76 minutes, the number of frames clock in at 123840, although by reusing certain frames at certain times it’s been reported that 109440 are used in the film [cite]. (Of course, there were likely many images that never made it to the final edit.) 

Because of the stop-motion, the final movie has a surreal choppiness that reminds me throughout the film that a human hand indeed designed, touched, and positioned every single frame. Unfortunately, those human-manipulated-physical-model days may be over forever in Hollywood because computer graphics and now AI can simulate that effect with computer model algorithms. But in the history of movie making, The Nightmare Before Christmas will go down as groundbreaking in many ways. There are other exceptional stop-motion (or claymation) animated films such as the Wallace and Gromit series of short movies, but nothing was as long or as ambitious as the Nightmare at the time of its release in 1993.

The Fascination of Stop-motion 

As mentioned, the effect of claymation (sometimes used in place of the term “stop-motion” if the models are clay or plasticine) is very labor intensive. Further, computers have predictably decreased the human time and labor cost for such an effect. Computers can add in frames (similar to interpolation) and also blur the frames together so that motion is more realistic when played quickly, but this is exactly one reason why the design of Nightmare is so admirable. Sometimes a fantastic design, product, or in this case, a film production can come from an imperfect human and designer who made decisions and positioned models not quite perfectly but to the best of their ability. The viewer and audience of these types of movies seem to be that much closer to the film creator. How so? Instead of looking through a set of computer filters, CG processing steps, and AI smoothing and fixing processing, we, the audience, feel like we are observing the exact same thing the creator saw on the movie set even frame by frame.  

On the other end of the spectrum, actors in CG heavy movies, like Lord of the Rings, will sometimes have to imagine the monster they are “fighting” on set, which the computer will add in later. But with stop-motion films, what the designer precisely sees is the same frame that makes it into the film and viewed by the audience. Admittedly, there is still some editing and post processing, but we generally enjoy being closer to the raw material. This perfect imperfection seems to resonate with our shared humanity the same way a hand-crafted object we buy directly from the designer seems to be of more value than one made by a machine or bought online from a warehouse. 

The director and producer on set. Image from theasc.com

Unacknowledged contributions 

Although The Nightmare Before Christmas gives possessory credit to Tim Burton, whose name appears at the front of the full title of the movie, it wasn’t directed by him and later interviews report that he was very rarely on set helping or guiding the work. Although others adopted and likely expanded his vision, his name is strongly associated with the film and does have his characteristic style and flavor. 

What this means is that there are many people behind the scenes that deserve our praise and admiration for good design even if we don’t know who they are by name. I applaud the hundreds of designers who painstakingly designed and positioned the characters and took still images with cameras week after week.  We might not know their names but I appreciate their contributions. Interestingly, as I’ve gotten older, I tend to read more of the names as the credits roll by after more movies. It takes a great team to make a great product and we have one in the form of this movie. Good movies always have a good team even if the awards go to the few. 

One of the many animators Owen Klatte on set in 1993. Image from uwm.edu

A lesson in all of this is that we might be working on something as part of a team but someone else might get all the credit. One can quickly become jaded looking for that recognition but I’ve tried to view the creation process and the word as its own reward. I have a friend who has worked on multiple, very famous, animated movies. You’ll never hear about him in the news but he simply enjoys working on his small scene or part that millions of people might see, even if his part is visible for only a few minutes in the movie.  This attitude has kept me learning and engaged in the design and creative process instead of looking behind me waiting for the crowds to follow and applaud my name. They might never come anyway. On the other hand, with Thanksgiving recently on our minds, we should be quick to notice when others are overlooked and point out their contributions if we have a position to do so. 

Diving Deeper into Design 

The movie itself dives into some deeper themes about motivations, ambition, and self-discovery. It humorously provides some commentary on the commercialization of the holidays, and a cautionary tale about overstepping one’s current position and abilities. I won’t go into all the themes and positive messages explored in the movie but I do think that the protagonist, Jack Skellington, has some great scenes and a character arc about how we should approach design or any other topic or skill that we want to learn or develop. 

Jack, the pumpkin king in Halloween Town, learns of this thing called Christmas and becomes completely enthralled by it. He reads about it, thinks about it, sings about it, and becomes obsessed with it. Without too many more details here, his obsession causes a nightmare for all the kids on Christmas eve and he eventually has to redeem himself and, as might be predicted in many Christmas movies, save Christmas. 

A scene from the movie. Image from theasc.com

What I want to share here is that Jack demonstrates a behavior that we should all consider adopting a little more often at certain times. Not the excessive obsession resulting in overstepping beyond what is appropriate, but a deeper dive into doing something and learning about something for which we care deeply. Far too often, in the lives of people around me, and in my own life, we don’t get into an area of our lives sufficiently. We seem to let life happen to us instead of living life the way we want. We consume media at far higher rates than creative ventures. We have goals and visions of completing that project or designing that product but we never get around to it. What I love about Jack is that he becomes completely absorbed in his design goals to recreate and become Santa Claus, who he deeply admires. Yes, he goes too far, but we could actually be a little more obsessive about certain things, in a healthy and balanced way. I think we err much more often on the “let’s not start” mistake instead of the “going too far” mistake. In this way, we all could be a little more like Jack. More people are scared to start than who go too far, and so my advice is about the former. So, if it’s working out more, eating better, sleeping better, studying better, or developing our design skills, there might be room for diving into one of those areas a little deeper, reading some books, talking to experts, and acting on our desires to really improve. 

Conclusion 

In conclusion, and as alluded to above, The Nightmare Before Christmas is defensibly uncategorizable. People have argued for years if it’s a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie. That debate might continue, but there are more debates that could ensue. After all, it’s a musical, it’s a horror movie, it’s a love story, it’s fantasy, it’s science fiction, and it’s a comedy, too. It’s funny, clever, inspiring, and even scary. What makes it timeless, at least in part, is its ability to cross genres and generations providing something for everyone regardless of their age or even preferences. It’s not often on people’s lists of best movies of all time, but across all time, it’s a very good movie and many people will agree it is unique and enjoyable. Since its release it has become a true cult classic. Your designs, and you yourself, don’t have to be everything to everyone. But at the same time, you are lots of different things and not really categorizable either. None of us like to be labeled and the movie The Nightmare Before Christmas does a great job of keeping the labels off. It’s perhaps a model for how we could design, work, and live as well.