Consider This from NPR - The Nightmare Before Christmas Turns 30

Episode Date: October 29, 2023

The Nightmare Before Christmas is back in theaters, celebrating its 30th anniversary. The film, directed by Henry Selick and produced by Tim Burton, was not a smash hit upon its release, but has become something of a holiday classic over the years. And while there is some debate as to whether it counts as a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie, its spooky themes draw many viewers back to the film every October. NPR's Scott Detrow spoke with Todd Lookinland, the set builder for The Nightmare Before Christmas, and writer and film critic Jordan Crucchiola, about the enduring legacy of film. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

30 years ago this weekend, a film completely out of the ordinary arrived in theaters, and it probably had a lot of moviegoers asking the same question. What's this? What's this? There's color everywhere. What's this? There's white things in the air. What's this? I can't believe my eyes. I must be dreaming. Wake up, Jack. This isn't fair. What's this? This was The Nightmare Before Christmas, of course, the story of Pumpkin King Jack Skellington's attempt to take over Christmas. Making Christmas, making Christmas.

Snakes and mice get wrapped up so nice with spider necks and pretty paws. The catchy music and lyrics came from Oscar-nominated composer Danny Elfman, and Jack's gleefully ghoulish world came from the mind of Tim Burton, the man responsible for other dark and quirky 90s entertainment like Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice. But with The Nightmare Before Christmas, a lot of fans feel that Burton and director Henry Selnick made a film unlike any other. I think what's something that always came across about Tim Burton's stuff in that era was that like you could feel it. You watch Jack walk through the pumpkin patch and you can like feel yourself crunching on pumpkin underneath your feet. Jordan Cruciola writes about film and is a huge horror film buff. She notes that Nightmare was so unlike

any other animated film that Disney had produced at the time that the studio really didn't know what to do with it. I really appreciate now just how incredibly grotesque it is. This is nightmarish and this is terrifying. It didn't seem like it had kids in mind. Disney wound up releasing the movie under Touchstone Pictures, their adult-oriented banner. The film was critically acclaimed, terrifying. It didn't seem like it had kids in mind. Disney wound up releasing the movie under Touchstone Pictures, their adult-oriented banner. The film was critically acclaimed, but only a

modest success at the box office. Maybe because too many parents were scared away. Todd Lookinland, who built sets for the film, says he could understand. We never thought of it as a kids movie. But it turns out it is a movie that a lot of kids loved and a lot of kids still love, including my five-year-old son. What do you like about The Nightmare Before Christmas? Everything. Yeah? Who's your favorite character? The one that I'm wearing right now. Oh, because you're wearing Jack Skargenton pajamas.

And millions of other families have made the film a staple of the Halloween season. To mark the 30th anniversary, Disney has re-released the film in theaters nationwide. This is Halloween, almost. Jack Skellington's big moment. So we'll revisit how a weird little movie became a holiday classic, and we will tackle the controversy over which holiday the movie belongs to. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Sunday, October 29th. It's Consider This from NPR.

To Todd Lookingland, it was clear right from the beginning that this was a special movie. You know, on this movie, every single thing was made by hand. We didn't use computers to build anything. It was all hand-built. Along with that careful crafting, one thing that Todd Lookinland remembers about the production of The Nightmare Before Christmas was its sheer scale.

The thing that was exciting as a set builder on this was that there was no rule book. We didn't know how to do any of this. We just had to make it up as we went along. Everything had to be very rigid and very durable to last through the animation process. Animators were crawling around on top of these sets to get access to the puppets. And so they had to be very strong, very durable. We built hundreds of sets.

And in fact, we had to build multiples of many sets. Lickenland remembers the thrill he got when he first started seeing Nightmare Before Christmas merchandise pop up around the holiday. It was kind of surprising at first to start seeing Jack Skellington's face on, you know, like kids' backpacks and stuff. And I was like, wow, that's a Jack Skellington backpack or sweatshirt or something. It's just amazing to me that it's had this staying power. Jordan Cruciola remembers The Nightmare Before Christmas staying in rotation on her family's television growing up. There was not a wrong time of year to be watching The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Cruciola writes about film and is also the host of the podcast Feeling Seen. We called her up to talk about The Nightmare Before Christmas' enduring appeal, but we had to start with a very important question. To you, Halloween movie or Christmas movie? For me, this is a Christmas movie. I think this for me is primarily actually a Christmas movie. Interesting. Yeah, but I mean, I will watch it on Halloween and carve a pumpkin,

but there's something about it that just makes me feel Christmas. Would you stand by that and put a 13-foot Jack Skellington on your yard for Christmas? I absolutely would. I would put a Home Depot-sized Jack Skellington on my front yard. As he does, Tim Burton was pulling from a wide variety of influences for the look and feel of this film and the sets in similar ways of Edward Scissorhands and a lot of other of his classic works. Some of those influences are deep cuts that I think most viewers probably don't even register or just now probably think about them as Tim Burton type styles. Right. Can you help us understand what he was trying to do there? In the 90s, we were at like the peak of what we could accomplish with physical, practical in-camera effects without having jumped over the threshold of high quality CGI and digital

effects. So if it was going to be on screen, it kind of had to be there. It had to be there. It had to be tangible. It had to be there. It had to be tangible. It had to be real. You had to, you had map paintings hanging in the background. You had to be able to touch it and see it for the most part. Like obviously there was digital effects happening at the time, but it was this incredible era

of sort of the most extravagant we could be with practical effects. And you have this time where someone was such an incredible, specific, strange, idiosyncratic visual signature could put his things to life on screen. Almost 100% within your hands. You can feel Tim Burton movies. Let's talk about Jack Skellington for a moment. Because he is this beloved character. My house is increasingly filled with all types of Jack Skellington paraphernalia, and I'm okay with that. And he means well, right?

Like, what he is doing is earnest. Sandy Claus, in person. What a pleasure to meet you. You don't need to have another worry about Christmas this year. What? What? Consider this a vacation, Sandy. A reward.

It's your turn to take it easy. But there must be some... There's a counter-argument that he's a pouty emo guy and he's scaring kids and being incredibly mean to Santa Claus and to the children he's trying to help. How do you come down on all of that? And how do you think Jack Skellington in the end redeems himself and comes out on the positive side of the ledger you know what i like there's there's such a naivete

about his um scaring of children is something like this is what we're here this is our purpose this is what we do and they celebrate it as this wonderful act and like the community gets so excited about it this is halloween and then like when he takes Santa, like he really thinks he's doing the right thing. And he is truly shocked when he finds out that he's not. To me, Jack's biggest crime is that he has like a mansplaining posture on absolutely everything. You know, I think this Christmas thing is not as tricky as it seems. And why should they have all the fun? It should belong to anyone. Not anyone in fact, but me. Why, I could make a Christmas tree. Jack's sincere belief that he can have Christmas is, like, endearing to me.

But Jack's, like, insistence that he can figure out the meaning of Christmas and that he's going to let everyone know what Christmas means. It's like Jack needs to decontition himself from his patriarchal influences to think that he is entitled to absolutely everything so that is where i have a little hang up with jack skellington because he does have that moody indie pouty emo boy thing about him yeah which is fairly annoying but when he like when he puts himself on yes he goes to correct christmas he like frees santa gets him back out there but when jack puts himself on the line by going up against oogie boogie hello boogie jack but they said you were dead you must be double dead that to me is like that's the grand

heroic gesture obviously he's putting himself in harm's way Jack's not outsourcing solving the problem to somebody else. If one thing Jack Skellington can be credited for throughout the movie, it's that if he sees a problem, he is going to fix it himself. He's not going to pawn it off on other people. He is an individual of personal responsibility. So I do believe that through empathy and understanding and conversation, Jack can get away from his tendency to think that the whole world is just like his little goodie bag that he gets to pick through.

These are all good points, but in fairness, the entire town does treat him like he's the most important person in the world. You know, like that is the first 20 minutes of the movie. He is such a product of hero worship. We see how this man has become who he is. And, you know, I think there's a vital lesson there for everybody in seeing, like, listen, when you treat celebrity like they are beyond consequence,

they will behave like they are beyond consequence. We just got deep. I love it. Yeah. You talked earlier about the aesthetic of the movie. And, you know, stop motion is its own unique thing, but it's also to me so impressive that these characters are so emotive and so three-dimensional when they're just stop motion puppets in the end. that are various like shapes of roundness and then he has that big scrawling like mouth of his but he like he doesn't have pupils he he doesn't have eyebrows but when he like furrows what he does have like you feel his range of expression when he like pulls his face down and does like a scary face at lock stock and barrel when they're like being defiant and not doing what he wants like he becomes terrifying like to have the over-the-topness in every one

of them through like the incredibly delicate and elaborate work of stop-motion animation like the work that it takes i would imagine to make one stop-motion animation character make a facial expression and then you're going to do that with all of these characters throughout an entire feature film. I mean, it's miraculous that anything that this movie, anything Laika has ever put out, that it gets made at all feels like a miracle. A couple more big picture points I want to touch on. You're talking about this moment that we're at where there is Nightmare Before Christmas, paraphernalia, stocking stores all across the country. People still love this movie 30 years later. And first of all, what do you think the big appeal is?

Because as we all know, it was not a big hit right off the bat. It's grown over time. What do you think the draw is? I, you know, the sort of sentimentalist in me wants to think that like people latch on, people who find this movie now and latch onto it draw is i you know the sort of sentimentalist in me wants to think that like people latch on people who find this movie now and latch on to it like the the feeling of like that it is real and that it is something that they could touch and all these little figures were actually in camera like

getting back to that tangibility but that you know that could be just me overthinking it i think when you get over the you know maybe people didn't really know what to do with like a feature length, theatrical released claymation musical. Why, why would that ever be the case? Yeah. Claymation musical at the time, but now it's such like, it is such a known element that I feel like you know exactly what you're embracing, like to a, to a much more palatable degree, like in the way that Cats has its own like cult fandom. I don't think Nightmare Before Christmas is a cult movie. I think this is, at this point, it's become a sort of like traditional like holiday staple.

But like in the way that Cats still has its cult fandom, where when you watch it, you know exactly what you're getting into it for. And therefore the absurdity is part of the buy-in. Like now, if you're discovering the Nightmare Before Christmas, you probably know enough about it to understand kind of exactly

what you're getting into. The nature of, again, the horror, curious, musical, claymation, love story about a skeleton who wants to steal Christmas for himself despite being the king of Halloween. Last thing I'm wondering what you think about, and I guess this is going to be a leading question.

There have been so many movies or shows that I loved that have been rebooted in one way or another. And the reboot just leaves me cold. And I'm sad it didn't happen. Every once in a while, that's not the case. But do you think there would be anything to gain from some sort of a, a modern vernacular would sort of like, I don't want to hear Jack Skellington say like, so that's a thing. Like, I don't want to hear that, but like, even that I would be willing to like let go, let God, and accept that, you know, social vernacular more change with time. If this were to be redone, it could, it has to be, it has to be the claymation. It can't be 3D animation.

It can't be even the most gorgeous thing that Pixar could render and put in front of us. It has to be this. Like there's something about the macabre grossness of so much of what comes up in front of you in Nightmare Before Christmas that like I would accept it and be so curious to see what a filmmaker would do with a different interpretation of it as long as it was still done in the same style of animation you gotta have to me that's the make or break I will I will truly be open-minded to anything else but that has to stay Jordan Cruciola writer and host of the podcast Feeling Seen I love talking Nightmare Before Christmas with you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.