A Brief History
On October 18, 2024, we trucked off to our local cinema to watch a re-release of a cult classic stop-motion animated film that has delighted adults and children since 1993. This time around, the clarity and visual treat of RealD 3D made the movie even better.
Digging Deeper
Featuring the iconic music of Danny Elfman, the soundtrack complements the story line and action rather well. Things move along quickly enough that the audience does not have time to drift off and the relatively short running time of 76 minutes goes by quickly.
Voice acting is spot on and the feel good part of the plot is balanced against angst and tension with some minor horror-esque events and some bad guys to make things interesting.
The original film cost $18 million to produce with a return of $105.8 million, which is an indication of the love audiences have for the movie. Whether you have seen the film or not, the RealD version is worth going to the theater for. Not a lot of stuff coming right at you from the screen, but consistently excellent depth and clarity.
A trivia point is that in France they call the film L’Étrange Noël de monsieur Jack, which basically means “The Strange Christmas of Mr. Jack.” In German the title retains its English language name.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: What is your favorite stop motion film?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Bossert, David. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas Visual Companion. Disney Editions, 2023.
Shepherd, Megan. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Disney Press, 2023.
The featured image in this article, The Nightmare Before Christmas theatrical poster, is of a film poster, and the copyright for it is most likely owned by either the publisher or the creator of the work depicted. It is believed that the use of scaled-down, low-resolution images of film posters to provide critical commentary on the film in question or of the film poster itself, not solely for illustration, where no free equivalent is available or could be created that would adequately give the same information, on an education website, hosted on servers in the United States, qualifies as fair use under the copyright law of the United States.
