A nightmare that I want to never watch again

Rating: 2/10 (11 July 2014)

At a mere seventy-six minutes it feels like two hours. "The Nightmare Before Christmas" is a stop-motion animated film that has some beautifully flawless animation, creative designs for creatures and locations, and an interesting premise to it, but barely anything happens within the entire running time. The film is filled with uninteresting characters that are more action than motivation, songs that do not convey much, and some parts that are never explained.
Starting out in Halloween Town, the festivities of another Halloween end, but for the Pumpkin King Jack Skellington (Chris Sarandon) has grown to be tired of Halloween, and goes walking through the forest. In the forest, he comes across a group of trees with doors designed in the shape of holiday objects on them. Jack goes through the Christmas tree shaped door and ends up in Christmas Town. Jack returns to Halloween Town with his knowledge of Christmas, wanting to make everyone else in town understand it.
From this point on, the plot gets too complicated to properly explain because Jack's plans on what to do with his new knowledge of Christmas changes every ten minutes. First, he wants to inform the town about it at a town meeting. Then, he wants to make Christmas happen by kidnapping Santa (Edward Ivory) to keep him out of the way. There is no motivation to back up why Jack is doing any of this, yet he still does it, making him more action than motive. When he brings Christmas to the human world, he brings Halloween instead with terrifying presents, but there is no reason why he should have done this.
The musical numbers in this film are some of the most useless parts of the movie, which makes its very short run-time feel long. There are several musical numbers throughout the film, many of them several minutes long, and they barley convey anything. In Jack's song at the beginning of the movie, all we learn is that he is tired of Halloween, but that song runs for at least three minutes. Other songs gives out no information about the characters or is working towards a plot point, it is basically just a pointless musical number that are redundant. The opening song is all of the monsters singing about what they are and how it's Halloween. I'm confused. What are all of these creatures? Just have them each tell me what they are in a few stanzas of a song and then we'll put it all together to make a four minute song. That'll get it across to the audience.
How the worlds operate is never explained, nor does it make any sense. It is never stated specifically how the worlds are connected or if the other worlds are even aware of the other worlds existences. Jack apparently has no idea about the other holiday worlds, but the Christmas world knew of the human world. Then, all of the worlds are shown to be connected through some doorways in trees, yet Jack gets from the human world to Halloweentown via an entrance in a graveyard later on. Jack also flew into the sky while in Halloweentown in a sled pulled by skeleton reindeer, which would not fit through any of the doors or into the graveyard entrance, so how did he get to the human world?
Even with all of these other problems, the most surprising of them all is how pointless several of the characters are. Sally, as I mentioned above, is supposedly the second most important character in the whole movie after Jack, but she is pointless. All she does is run away from her creator, the Evil Scientist (William Hickey) and have a premonition involving Jack's Christmas. She also has a pointless romance with Jack that literally comes out of nowhere at the end and is pointless to the characters and the story. With Sally being pointless to the story, it also makes the Evil Scientist who made her pointless to have in the film.
"The Nightmare Before Christmas" is a movie that I'm barely sure of what happened in it. So few things of importance actually happens in the movie, and when they do, there is almost no motivation behind it. Bad musical numbers, pointless characters, action over motive, and set in a world that makes no sense of how it operates, this film is a nightmare that I want to never watch again.