The Nightmare Before Christmas DVD > Reviews > Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Loved it
Story	Outstanding
Characters / Performances	Outstanding
Special Effects	Outstanding
How does it compare to similar films?	Good

Advantages:	Love the animation and characters .   Musical score is good too .
Disadvantages:	May not be every adults cup of tea .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

This film was released in 1994 in the UK. It is an animated stop motion picture, written by Tim Burton, who is also responsible for huge films such as Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice.

This brilliant, but dark animation film tells the story of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, who lives amongst ghouls and goblins in Halloween Town. He comes across a strnage tree whilst walking his ghost dog and ventures down a hole into a town where Christmas is happening. Jack has never experienced anything like it before and when he returns back to Halloween Town, he decides to re-create all of the things he saw there for his own town. However, his goodwill turns sour when his mission puts the real Santa Claus in jeopardy, and so Jack has to takeover Claus's role and deliver all of the presents not to the habitants amusement.

This film is a brilliant example of stop-motion animation and the characters and sets are very well imagined by the artistic creators and by Burton himself. Characters include; Sally, the one who lives Jack but who is kept in check by the creepy Dr. Finkelstein, and a troublesome Oogie Boogie who kidnaps Santa Claus.
The settings are quite dark and sketchy, not dissimilar to the original conceptual drawings.

The score, written by Danny Elfman (a frequent addition to Burtons' films) and creates a musical type effect to the film with the characters singing as if they were on stage.

This film is for kids and adults alike, as this film caused an extraordinary cult following, with film merchandise springing up everywhere, in all sorts of forms. Tim Burtons fans are sure to love this, even though it is in a different format to his real life films like Sleepy Hollow with live actors.

The film runs for approx. 73mins and is deemed PG due to some unsuitable scenes for young children. It is in widescreen and colour PAL.

The special features on this DVD are impressive, and keep to the films theme well. They include; deleted scenes, behind the scenes and studio (which is very interesting to see how it all comes together), storyboards and image galleries for the conceptual artwork fans, and also shows a few more of Burton's animated attempts. For example there is a short film called Vincent that is worth a watch.