One of the best animated musicals of all time

Rating: 9/10 (8 May 2005)

The first inspiration for this movie came when Tim Burton was walking past a shop window and saw the Halloween decorations being taken down and replaced by Christmas decorations. The peculiar image of Santa and his reindeer matched with the ghouls and goblins and Halloween sparked off an idea for a creepy poem, which eventually become an ambitious feature length project made entirely with stop-motion ...
Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, is the most popular figure in Halloweentown -- a town populated by figures such as Mr Hyde, the Wolf Man, a mad scientist and assorted ghosts, goblins and mutants. Every year they come together for the soul purpose of scaring everyone, and then wait 365 days until next Halloween. But this year is going to be a little different ... while wandering through the woods, Jack finds a portal to a place called Christmastown, and watches as Santa and his elves make presents and prepare for this years festivities. Fascinated by this, Jack comes up with a plan to 'hijack' Christmas, kidnapping Santa and having the citizens of Halloweentown make lots of unusual presents for him to deliver on his skeleton sleigh ...
While this movie is adapted from an illustrated poem by Tim Burton and superbly directed by Henry Selick (James and Giant Peach), the real star of the show is Danny Elfman, who scores most of Burton's movies. He wrote the score and the lyrics for "Nightmare Before Christmas", and also performed as the singing voice of the 'hero', Jack Skellington. The quality of the songs and the music is above and beyond what anybody could have expected from this movie and, strange as it sounds, this is actually my favourite musical of the last twenty years or so at least. Songs such as "This is Halloween", "Jack's Lament" and various others are masterpieces of high-class Gothic music, and the tunes will stay with you for a long time afterwards.
The voice-over cast are all top-class, with performers such as Chris Sarandon (The Princess Bride), Catherine O'Hara (Lemony Snicket) and Glenn Shadix (Heathers). And the look of the film is just fantastic ... it's a real visual treat, and that alone is reason enough to watch it even it it wasn't for the great music and captivating story. Tim Burton was so enthralled by the creepy stop-motion animation here that he used it again in "Mars Attacks", and in his 2005 movie "The Corpse Bride", which looks very similar to this one.
It's dark and it's wonderful and it's more than slightly disturbing ... next Halloween, you have to watch this movie.