Christmas Town? Hmmm . . .

Rating: 7/10 (20 December 2014)

No one saw THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE Christmas securing a solid pop culture standing, but it certainly has. And that makes me happy. There's some unexpected heart to this movie - at the very least on a technical level (you can see it was a labor of live with the staggering attention to detail and amazingly fluid animation, particularly in Jack's spindly limbs). And I love that, at its core, it's about a misguided scare king trying to extrapolate the meaning of Christmas from its various parts (complete with a scene in the lab). To top that off, it all goes horribly wrong. How often do you see Santa totally pi**ed? This is a winner for its songs alone, but it's also a high watermark in stop-motion animation. It's macabre, a little dark and just demented enough to still be wholly unique.
8/10