Engrossing, poorly structured imagination

Rating: Null/10 (24 December 2011)

Having seen this a number of times over the years, each one leaving me a little more underwhelmed than the one before, I am convinced it doesn't quite work for one reason; Burton, Selick and his team, or whoever you want to credit for the film, know horror movies and so are able to imaginatively dress the thing but they don't understand the musical, from where they have borrowed the mechanics.
So we get a colorful universe rigged and animated with some flair for the macabre, with a ghoulish gallery of familiar figures from traditional horror lore, and songs that are pretty good to listen to over the holidays, but zero connection between the two.
You can tell at any rate that it was the ghoulish aspect above all that piqued the filmmaker's interest, by comparing how vivid feels Halloweentown to everything else.
Now what makes a good musical work, and work as more than just catchy spectacle, is some ability to integrate the numbers, by definition ostentatious expressions of some visual purity, within the surrounding world that provides the inspiration for expression. How the thing was pioneered for example back in the heyday of Busby Berkeley, was that we got a show about the efforts to stage a show. We were trusted to pick up a set of troubling circumstances surrounding the show, that were in fact about the people behind the show, so that once the show got rolling, in place of conventional dramatic situations, they could be resolved with only dance and song.
The result felt magical, a key property of the musical, but only because we were dazzled by a show that was mapping inwards, beyond logical reasoning into unfathomable soul, conflating equally spontaneous capacities of that soul for love and art.
Here they got at least the blueprint right, perhaps by sheer association with the format; it is again a show about the efforts to stage a show, here a musical Christmas, and one that goes horribly awry because it doesn't flow from truthful heart. So however well intended and beautifully wrapped, every gift terrifies, every gesture of that show, by revealing what unconscious soul was poured into its making. Be as you were meant to be is the overall gist, no matter how ugly the mask and role you were burdened with.
But so many resources were dedicated into reworking friendlier designs from Caligari and Frankenstein, that no one seems to have really bothered with structuring the thing. It just plays on, one number after the other. The cabinet is overflowing with curiosities. The story is simply sung for a change, with nothing to tease in how it's choreographed together.
It panders heavily, it's dumbed down; since after all it was strategically designed to be a very commercial project that should appeal to anyone. It tackles the two most popular cultural holidays of the year, and plays just as well for either.