‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ is a stop-motion animated musical dark fantasy film, the plot follows The Pumpkin King himself Jack Skellington as he grows tired of his role as King and yearns for something different; then after a trip to Christmas town decides that he wants to spread joy rather than chills and, scares.
‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ is a film I remember being enamoured with when I was a kid, however, revisiting it ten years later I found it was not in any way how I remembered it; very much in a bad way. Yes in this review I will be saying why I don’t like ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, which to some is Christmas heresy.
Before I get to that though I want to talk about the stop-motion animation, which is of course wonderfully unique and, very nice to see; as there really aren’t many films like this anymore. The character models, however, are off-putting, I understand that is the point to some extent, but other than Jack, (Chris Sarandon) and, Sally, (Catherine O’ Hara) I found a lot of the other characters very hard to look at for long periods.
Despite not being directed by Tim Burton this is very much one of his films, the style and, the characters are all very much the same if you have ever seen something like Beetlejuice or, for an animated example the Corpse Bride then you know what you’re getting. After watching this film and, thinking back to Burton’s other works I have come away with the conclusion that as a filmmaker he is very hit or miss you either love his style or, you hate it.
The other thing I strongly dislike about this film is the constant singing, yes I know it’s a musical, it seems like every 5 seconds they are bursting into song. I like the odd musical here and there, they are not my genre for sure, but where I think something like Frozen, which is also a musical, gets right is that it uses its songs sparingly which makes them memorable. Whereas ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ seems to operate by a policy of how many songs can I fit into the runtime of this film.
The songs themselves are all fine, with a few standouts amongst them, but I found many of the songs went on for too long and, negatively affected the pacing of the film, sometimes making me want to turn the film off as a result as I was quickly losing interest.
Ultimately this film did not live up to how I remembered it from my childhood, I found the characters off-putting, the constant singing annoying and, though there was some Burton charm to be found it was well hidden. I like the Corpse Bride more.
1.5/5
Reviewed by Luke
Another Millennial Reviewer 