NightmareChristmas.com

By John Hartl

From The Seattle Times, 10.22.2000

William Friedkin’s The Exorcist isn’t the only Halloween-appropriate classic in multiplexes this month. Disney’s 1993 fantasy, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, is getting a 10-day reissue beginning Friday at several theaters.

The story of Jack Skellington, a madcap ghoul who runs Halloweentown and greedily tries to take over Christmas, the script was inspired by the Dr. Seuss classic, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (which gets its first big-screen edition next month).

Producer Burton, who made Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow, came up with his own twist on the story.

“Instead of someone who hates Christmas and wants to steal toys, it’s about someone who wants to share the joy (of Christmas) in a maniacal way,” said the film’s director, Henry Selick, from his San Francisco home.

“He falls in love with it too hard, and blinds himself to what he’s doing. Jack can talk himself into anything. I love that character. He just doesn’t realize, while he’s giving himself this pep talk, that he’s wrong. At Halloween, people want a scare. They don’t expect it at Christmas.”

Although Burton’s name is in the title, he picked Selick to direct the picture. Burton once explained to The New York Times that he lacks the patience for dealing with stop-motion animation. He claimed it would have “put me in the nut house by now.”

“I have a history with this kind of animation, and I’m very comfortable with it,” said Selick. “Tim had never been involved in animated features, only short pieces. Also we’d been friends, we came from the same planet, and he was busy with Batman Returns. ”

This week’s national reissue was inspired by the success of Nightmare last Halloween at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles: “They sold out every show for three nights, so they figured they’d expand the run.”

Selick first encountered The Nightmare Before Christmas at Disney in the early 1980s, when Burton proposed it as a 30-minute television special. At the time, Burton was gaining a reputation for such inventive shorts as Vincent and Frankenweenie, but he had not proven himself at the box office.

“It was too crazy for Disney in those days,” said Selick, who eventually joined Burton in leaving the studio.

While Burton was directing such hits as Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Batman, Selick was building a reputation on MTV with a stop-motion series called Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions.

“My MTV work, from 1987 to 1990, was what convinced Tim that I should direct,” he said. Disney lured Burton back, Selick came with him, and the television short became an animated feature with music.

“I always felt from the beginning that there was too much to put into a 30-minute TV special,” said Selick. “Then (composer) Danny Elfman came along, and we basically created an opera. Through song, it turned into a feature. The songs could talk about characters’ inner feelings.”

Saddled with a relatively low budget, Selick nevertheless decided to use sophisticated computers to create a sense of movement in the film. The camera seems to swoop through space to follow the characters.

“It was very labor intensive,” he said. “We had to grow a studio, where virtually every camera would be on some kind of motion-control system. That was one reason why I spent three years on the movie.”

In conjunction with the theatrical reissue, Disney is also releasing a new DVD of The Nightmare Before Christmas, including most of the supplemental material that was featured on the deluxe “Collector’s Edition” laser disc.

“There’s an alternate ending, which we did only in storyboards, that I always liked a lot,” said Selick.

The director has been hooked on animation since he saw Ray Harryhausen’s The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad when he was 5.

“I didn’t go into making puppets or things,” he said. “I was always a drawer. I’d do flip books, but it wasn’t until I got into college that I did animation.” For a while, he was also “pretty serious” about his high-school rock band. He still plays the piano and clarinet.

After leaving Disney, he worked for several weeks in Seattle on Carroll Ballard’s 1986 film of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Nutcracker,” creating storyboards and miniatures. He also worked in collaboration with Portland animator Will Vinton on Return to Oz.

“Storyboarding was how I learned to direct, and I worked on Oz for about a year,” said Selick. Although the picture flopped, he feels it is truer to the original “Oz” books than MGM’s 1939 version.

Selick’s last film was James and the Giant Peach (1996), another animation collaboration with Burton.

He’s now in post-production on Monkeybone, a (mostly) live-action fantasy that will be released in early 2001.

Brendan Fraser plays a budding cartoonist, on the verge of great success, who goes into a coma and meets his nightmarish alter ego. Whoopi Goldberg and Dave Foley are in the cast.

“Live action is much more seat of your pants,” said Selick. “In animated films you’re doing all your editing before the movie. With live action, you shoot a lot and it becomes a jigsaw puzzle. But all my films take a long time.”