"Surprised, aren't you?"

Rating: 9/10 (23 March 2014)

One of the many pleasures about this film is that there is not a single recognizable landscape within it. Everything looks strange and haunting.
The movie, which tells the story of an attempt by Halloween to annex Christmas, is shot in a process called stop-action animation. In an ordinary animated film, the characters are drawn. Here they are constructed, and then moved a little, frame by frame, so that they appear to live. This allows a three-dimensional world to be presented, instead of the flatter universe of cell animation. And it is a godsend for the animators of "Nightmare," who seem to have built their world from scratch - every house, every stick and stone - before sending their skeletal characters in to inhabit it.
The movie begins with the information that each holiday has its own town. Halloweentown, for example, is in charge of all the preparations for Halloween, and its most prominent citizen is a bony skeleton named Jack Skellington. One day Jack stumbles into the wrong entryway in Halloweentown, and finds himself smack dab in the middle of preparations for Christmas. Now this, he realizes, is more likes it! Instead of ghosts and goblins and pumpkins, there are jolly little helpers assisting Santa in his annual duty of bringing peace on earth and goodwill to men.
"The Nightmare Before Christmas" is a Tim Burton film in the sense that the story, its world and its look first took shape in Burton's mind, and he supervised their filming. But the director of the film, a veteran stop-action master named Henry Selick, is the person who has made it all work. And his achievement is enormous.