Now digitally restored and remastered with state-of-the-art technology, The Nightmare Before Christmas: Collector s Edition is deeper, darker and more brilliant than ever as Tim Burton originally envisioned. Can Christmas be saved? Bored with the same old scare-and-scream routine, Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, longs to spread the joy of Christmas. But his merry mission puts Santa in jeopardy and creates a nightmare for good little boys and girls everywhere! This new version comes with DisneyFile Digital Copy, a full-length version of the movie you can transfer and watch on your PC, Mac, and video-enabled compatible portable players.
Customer Review: THE Blu-Ray film for the holidays
What a great film for Blu-Ray! Crammed with detail and composed like a series of paintings, it demands the high-definition treatment to fully appreciate. On one hand, the scenes are filled with little surprises like tarantula- and bat-shaped neckties and snakes, but on the other hand they are so artistic! Once you watch Jack Skellington’s operatic posings against the moon at 1080p, or see the eerie gray backgrounds of Halloweentown or the vivid colors of Christmastown at that resolution, I can’t imagine watching this movie any other way.
But that’s not all there is to it. In fact, “The Nightmare Before Christmas” is a feast for the eyes, ears and imagination; a delectable witches’ brew of stop-motion animation, catchy show tunes and a seriously warped creative license.
The story — Halloweentown attempts to annex Christmastown — comes from the macabre mind of producer Tim Burton, who wrote it in his spare time (as a poem!) while working as a Disney animator in the 1980s. The movie blends the tastiest bits of Burton’s earlier Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands with a sprinkling of the stop-motion magic first found in Disney’s 1961 Babes in Toyland.
The imaginative cast of characters includes:
* Jack Skellington (the Pumpkin King) (Chris Sarandon), a mischievous misfit who believes his purpose in life is to merge the holidays of Halloween and Christmas.
* His faithful dog Zero, a ghost with a glowing, jack-o’-lantern nose who, like the hound in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, eventually pulls the sleigh.
* Rag-doll heroine Sally (voiced by Catherine O’Hara), Jack’s love interest, who sews herself back together when she loses a body part.
* Oogie Boogie (Broadway veteran Ken Page), a slimy, singing bag of bugs who channels the cartoon version of Cab Calloway in the old Betty Boop shorts.
* Lock (Paul “Pee-Wee Herman” Reubens), Shock (O’Hara) and Barrel (Danny Elfman, the film’s composer), a trio of evil trick-or-treaters who “kidnap the Sandy Claws”
* Wheelchair-bound evil scientist Dr. Finklestein (William Hickey), a duckbilled quack whose flip-top head lets him scratch his brains for inspiration.
* A mayor (Glenn Shadix, the interior director Otho in Beetlejuice) who is literally two-faced.
Director Henry Selick painstakingly created the film over three years. Though he had a production crew of over 100, each minute of footage took a week, as each second required 24 ever-so-slightly different shots.
Devilishly nonconformist, “The Nightmare Before Christmas” is an enduring holiday musical for the whole Addams family, or at least those older than, say, 6. Though all of its fright gags are played entirely for laughs, some of the imagery is downright creepy. Teenagers will love it.
BONUS FEATURES
* An audio commentary with Burton, Selick and Elfman.
* A downloadable digital copy of the film, which you can transfer to an iPod or similar device.
* Burton’s first short, 1982’s 6-minute “Vincent,” a black-and-white stop-action film about a boy who dreams of being Vincent Price, who narrates.
* Burton’s 1994 Disney live-action short “Frankenweenie.” In this 30-minute black-and-white film that re-imagines the Frankenstein story as the tale of a young boy and his car-struck pet dog in suburban America (introduced by Burton himself).
* A reading of Burton’s original “Nightmare Before Christmas” poem by actor Christopher Lee
* A promotional film for the annual “Nightmare” makeover of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.
* Promotional and making-of featurettes, a storyboard to film comparison, deleted scenes and theatrical trailers and posters.
OTHER VERSIONS AVAILABLE
There are two other new “Nightmare” DVDs available — a two-disc standard-resolution set that includes a downloadable digital copy and a collector’s edition that comes with a hand-painted bust of Jack Skellington.
Customer Review: This year, Christmas is ours!
Only Tim Burton could produce a holiday musical about Halloween’s grotesqueries taking over Christmas.
And in fact he did. Burton wrote and produced a charming stop-motion musical called “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” which is as close as we’ll ever get to a Burton Christmas film. And there’s rarely a dull moment in this town called Halloween — from start to finish, it’s a quirky, macabre, vintage-flavoured ride through the darker side of everybody’s favorite holidays.
In Halloween Town, the undead Jack Skellington is king, and each Halloween the residents try to make their celebration even more horrible than the year before.
But this year, something is missing for Jack, and he starts wondering if scaring people is all his life has. He ends up wandering into a sort of holiday junction, and finds a portal to Christmas Town — it’s full of snow, lights, presents and innocent fun. Jack is instantly enamoured of Christmas, and decides that for this year, the residents of Halloween Town are going to celebrate Christmas.
He manages to convince the other Halloween residents — except the sweet rag-doll Sally — to go along with his plan. So Halloween Town is redecorated and filled with presents (in a suitably ghastly style) and “Sandy Claws” is abducted so Jack can take his place. But are the people of Halloween Town just not suited to innocent merriment, and can the Pumpkin King fill the capacious red suit when Christmas Eve rolls around?
The idea of Halloween ghouls and spooks deciding to take over Christmas sounds terribly twee in concept, like a gimmicky children’s book. Fortunately Tim Burton’s darkly humorous sense of humor and delightfully gothic designs — as well as Henry Selick’s brilliant direction — end up turning the movie into something that is more than just another kid’s movie. Think a Burtonesque “Princess Bride.”
Much of its charm comes from the richness of Burton’s visuals — his Halloween Town is saturated in spiky iron fences, ghost dogs, insects, mad scientists, and a spooky cloudy night that never ends. And though the inhabitants of Halloween Town are devoted to being grotesque and spooky, there’s a lighthearted benevolence in their actions at all times. It almost makes Christmas Town look… dull.
But it’s also an incredibly funny, sweet little movie, with plenty of heart. There’s an adorable little love story between Jack and Sally (”My dearest friend, if you don’t mind…”), despite Jack’s total cluelessness. And Burton weaves in lots of solid musical numbers (”There’s children throwing snowballs/instead of throwing heads/they’re busy building toys/and absolutely no one’s dead!”).
But the crown jewel is Burton’s macabre sense of humor. Hardly a scene goes by without a creepy gag (one child’s present is a shrunken head) or clever dialogue (”Jack, please, I’m only an elected official here. I can’t make decisions by myself!”). But the best humor comes from the Halloween-town’s residents eagerly trying to be festive, and only making Christmas even creepier than Halloween ever could be.
For a skeleton puppet, Jack Skellington is a pretty adorable hero — he’s earnest, generous, but suffers from a bit of ennui from the same old performance every year. His meditative songs about Halloween and his attempts at Christmas add an introspective note to him as well. And he’s backed by a bunch of lovable characters, with Sally and the ghost dog Zero at the forefront.
“Nightmare Before Christmas” is a macabre, wildly adorable little movie that reminds us why we love Halloween (besides the candy). Sometimes the dark and fun go hand in hand. “BUY NOW”
You know exactly what you’re getting in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation: another goofball, slapstick comedy of chaos and catastrophe with Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) and family. This time, there’s no traveling involved: Clark and Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) prepare for a nice Christmas with the kids (played by none other than Juliette Lewis and Roseanne star Johnny Galecki), when their home is invaded by backwoods cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) and his brood, along with assorted other crazy and/or stuffy relatives. Complications, of course, are inevitable. The film is preceded by National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) and National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985) and followed by National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation (1997). Directed by Jeremiah Chechik, who went on to do Benny & Joon and the Sharon Stone remake of Diabolique. –Jim Emerson