The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Jack Skellington, the pumpkin king of Halloween Town, is bored with doing the same thing every year for Halloween. One day he stumbles into Christmas Town, and is so taken with the idea of Christmas that he tries to get the resident bats, ghouls, and goblins of Halloween town to help him put on Christmas instead of Halloween -- but alas, they can't get it quite right. Hilarity ensues.

Trivia: In the original Poem Written by Tim Burton the only characters that every existed were Jack, Zero and Santa. All the other characters were made up for the movies, although he describes some of the presents which were given out including in some cases the names of the children. Tim Burton has said the original poem was inspired after seeing Halloween merchandise display in a store being taken down and replaced by a Christmas display. The juxtaposition of ghouls and goblins with Santa and his reindeer sparked his imagination. Oogie Boogie is inspired by Cab Calloway, who provided character voices and musical numbers for several Fleischer Bros. cartoons; he and Santas Claus quote dialog from the Betty Boop short "The Old Man of the Mountain", when Santa asks,(quoting Betty's line) "What are you going to do now?", and Oogie returns Calloway's (as the Old Man) "Goin' do the best I can..." This was the first movie to ever be fully animated using the stop-motion technique that was favored by Tim Burton for special effects in some of his other movies for its surreal quality. The animators received Oscar nominations for Best Visual Effects as a result, but lost to ILM who created the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park (1993).

While researching trivia for this movie I discovered that Disney is releasing this in 3-D in two days! Whoo Hoo! I will have to see if it is showing here. I LOVE this movie. I have since I first saw it. The depth of the shots, the characters, THE MUSIC. It is incredible. This is the movie that made me fall in love with Tim Burton films. I liked Beetle Juice and Batman before this but man. An interesting note, Danny Elfman, who composed all the music was the singing voice of Jack, he was also the voice of Barrel, along with Lock (Paul Ruebens) and Shock (Catherine O'Hara), quite a trio there. Elfman's music is the star of the film and it fits so well with the charactersm, who are very well defined. All in all a great movie, if you haven't seen it, see if it is playing in 3-D near you this weekend. Be sure to click on the poster to the right and see the full size picture, it's great.