What Would Happen If Halloween And Christmas Fused?
Jack Skellington is growing rather bored of Halloween. All of the scares and screams have grown weary on him, and although he’s the best and the citizens of Halloween Town depend on him every year to give the Real World a good scare, he’s growing tired of it. After another successful Halloween, we find Skellington going to the graveyard to spend time with his pet ghost dog, Zero, in an attempt to get away from it all and think his existence over. After walking all night, Skellington comes to a forest he’d never seen before, with several trees, each with an emblem of a related holiday; a turkey for Thanksgiving, a colored egg for Easter, and a wonderfully decorated pine tree for Christmas. This emblems are actually doors, and Skellington can’t keep himself from opening the door to Christmas. When he does, he’s drawn in, and finds himself in Christmas Town, and he simply loves it.
Skellington makes it his mission then to be able to logically explain Christmas, conducting various experiments back in Halloween Town in his home, like performing surgery on a teddy bear, boiling a broken Christmas ball ornament, and he feverishly studies Christmas lore, stories, and carols. He decides, and then announces that Halloween Town will host Christmas this year to the real world, his original intention being good, but as you can imagine, the execution goes horribly wrong until Santa is able to fix everything up right.
It’s quite an amazing tale for youngsters and adults alike; the appeal is quite broad and throughout the film you can’t help but be amazed by the creativity of the stop-motion animation and the clever lyrics of the dozen or so songs that are sang by Skellington and Sally and other characters. Seeing so many famous, or infamous perhaps, creatures like a Wolfman, vampires, an evil scientist, an evil clown, and Oogie Boogie, the Boogie Man come to life in this wonderful form of animation was a treat in itself.
It’s hard not to like all of the characters and the story; I thought the Mayor of Halloween Town was a favorite of mine. The story is captivating from start to finish, and at only about seventy-five minutes, doesn’t risk running on too long for younger audiences, too. It’s little wonder that this film won awards back when it first came out fifteen years ago.
Collector’s Edition DVD
This isn’t the first time this film has come to DVD, by my count it’s actually the third time since 1997, when the film was first released. There hasn’t been a Region 1 release of it since the “Special Edition” in 2000 as far as I can tell. That said, a lot of what’s on this Collector’s Edition is re-hashed from the 2000 version, with very little difference, more on those momentarily. This particular version also takes the original film and digitally restores it, and while I haven’t seen the original film on screen or on any previous DVD release, the video and audio looked very good with little to no signs of aging.
On the first disc, you will discover these Bonus Features:
What’s This?: Jack’s Haunted Mansion Holiday Tour – Taking its name from one of the best songs in the film, the “What’s This?,” extra feature is broken up into three parts. The first two parts are exactly the same except that on the second part, there is a cool trivia track. Both of these features run just over seven minutes and they are simply a narrated, rhyming tour of the Jack’s Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyworld that is on display from Mid-October until Mid-January.
The third part of this Bonus Feature is about thirty-seven minutes long, and is more of a making-of for the Jack’s Haunted Mansion. Most of the previous seven minute feature is reused, but interviews with several of the crew from the film talk about how they got the idea and how the actual theme ride was setup.
Disc 2 features quite a few other features, here they are in the order I viewed them in:
Posters & Trailers – This feature displays about six various promotional posters for the film and two trailers, a teaser and the theatrical trailer.
Storyboard/Film Comparison – Here we have about three minutes and forty-five seconds of storyboard versus actual film comparison. What this shows is various scenes of the film, on the top half of your screen you will see the storyboard and on the bottom half of the screen you see the finished piece.
Worlds of Nightmare Before Christmas – This is a multi-tier feature that includes some information on the Halloween, Christmas, and Real worlds found in the film. Once you click on one of these regions, you will be taken to another menu with more choices. For Halloween, for example, you can view various stills of some of the main characters of the town, including Jack, Sally, and Zero. With Jack, you can also view about twenty character design stills and a two minute test animation sequence that has an audio commentary by director Henry Selick. Sally and Zero also have test animation footage, as well as concept and character design art. For the other three or four elements of Halloween Town, just character design and concept art are shown.
The Christmas Town and Real World section of this feature is a little less detailed, including just concept art and character design artwork for Santa and Santa’s helpers. The Real World feature has more artwork, but it’s the least interesting pack of art of the bunch.
Deleted Scenes – Three deleted storyboard sequences and three deleted animated scenes are available for your viewing, with very brief introductions by I believe Director Selick. All told this amounts to almost eight minutes of footage. You will see and hear why an elaborate dancing sequence with Oogie Boogie was left out, as well as see Jack do just a little bit more research on Christmas in this feature.
Vincent – A five minute stop motion short story that was written and directed by Burton, and read by Vincent Price is about a young boy with quite an imagination. He finds himself trapped in his own horrors that he has created in his mind; it’s a decent short that’s worth a watch.
Frankenweenie – In 1984, Tim Burton directed a thirty minute short film starring the Frankenstein family which includes Daniel Stern as Ben Frankenstein, Shelley Duval as his wife Susan, and Barret Oliver as their son. When Sparky, the family dog gets killed by running out into the street, Barret decides to look into reanimation through electricity, and manages to dig up and reanimate Sparky. It’s kind of a goofy, morbid tale, but the dog ends up saving his life and the town eventually accepts him. Burton is set to release a stop-motion film of the same story in just a few weeks on TV’s Toon Disney according to Wikipedia.
Disc 3 (Digital Copy) – Disney also includes a handy digital copy of this film that, with an included key you can put onto your portable device or computer.
That’s A Wrap
Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is an easy film to enjoy. It’s incredibly creative, wonderfully executed, and just a real treat from start to finish. This DVD set is well put together and commendably thorough, although truth be told there isn’t as much making-of and behind the scenes goodies as the sheer number of extra features would lead you to believe. That said, it’s still a great film, and a well rounded, solid release on DVD.
