The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Retro Review #31: What's This?! It’s Tim Burton’s glorious collision between Dark and Whimsy.
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) — What’s This?! It’s Tim Burton’s glorious collision between Dark and Whimsy.
+ Feature film, !@ 1h 17m🎖️
A+>
Family Suitability
+ ✅3️⃣ OK for older kids. (Grades 4+) | PGa
Alignment with Judeo-Christian Values
+ ❎0️⃣ Neutral (No clear values of any type or ⚠️ includes both negative messages and positive messages, which balance out.)
+ Based on literature (poem, written in 1982, unpublished until 2006) “Nightmare Before Christmas” ⭐ by Tim Burton ⭐
+ 1️⃣/? works in Nightmare Before Christmas multiverse ⭐
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Grade: A+> (20.0) / HOF: 60
EQ 👍A+ | 📖A+ 👥A 📽️A+ 🎼A+
DW 😎😎13.0 | 🌚13 🌝13
POPCAP 💯n/a 🍿n/a 🧢n/a
L-R ☮️n/a ◀️n/a ▶️n/a 🛐n/a
Halloween. Dark. Christmas. Whimsy. Blend generous portions of each holiday and you can’t help but get Dark Whimsy.
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas easily reaches the top possible reading on both the Dark and the Whimsy scale. The needle just shoots all the way over and maxes out like if your ten-year-old impossibly figured out how to climb into the scale in the produce aisle of the grocery store.
So it’s a perfect movie for us to use in introducing our Dark Whimsy meter with its twin scales of Dark and Whimsy. We’ll remove it from the genre emoji row and give it a line of its own. Thirteen seems like just the right number to choose for the highest possible reading on each scale. Then the Dark Whimsy score is the integer value of the lower reading, plus a decimal value weighted by the higher reading, a bit stronger if Whimsy is the higher reading. A Dark Whimsy score of 7.0 or better makes the film at least a nominal entry into the Dark Whimsy genre (or Dark Whimzy if I recommend it for adults only). When the score is 10.0 or better, I call that Pure Dark Whimsy (or Pure Dark Whimzy), since a work like that fits unmistakably into the Dark Whimsy genre.
Wait, this is supposed to be a Retro Review, not a Reference Rundown. The Dark Whimsy Reference Rundown still needs some tuning but I will publish it soon enough. (Note: It was published January 10, 2025, roughly three weeks after this post was originally published to the text group.)
Back to the movie...
The Nightmare Before Christmas may get the highest Dark Whimsy score I give, but please notice that it comes up just a little bit short of the best overall grade I give. I give it an A+>, putting it in the middle tier of my A+ grades. A Christmas Story, graded A+^, in the top tier of my A+ grades, is my favorite film I’ve reviewed so far that fits the Dark Whimsy genre. I wasn’t publishing Dark Whimsy scores at the time, but the score for A Christmas Story will be lower, not being as Dark as The Nightmare Before Christmas. Like any other genre, Dark Whimsy films can vary wildly in overall quality, but as you may have guessed by now, I’m very favorably disposed towards movies that fit the genre well.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is based on an unpublished poem by modern Dark Whimsy master, Tim Burton. For home video releases, English actor Sir Christopher Lee, renowned for playing villains in horror movies, performs a reading of the poem as an extra.
The film has a clever plot, with the natives of Halloween Town kidnapping Santa from Christmas Town, and failing miserably in understanding how to do Christmas. Since Easter also makes a brief cameo appearance, the movie is a triple-holiday feast for the eyes. You might call it a visual turducken.
There’s something about well-crafted stop-motion animation that is just mesmerizing—far more appealing to watch than traditional animation or even modern computer animation.
This movie is a feast for the ears also. The score and all the songs in the film were written by Danny Elfman. Just for the songs, he also supplies the voice of lead character Jack Skellington. Elfman got his start as the songwriter and lead singer of the 1980s band Oingo Boingo, but since then he’s become a Hollywood musical legend, composing scores for over 100 feature films. He’s one of just a very few composers that I track in my personal film database. While there are no songs in the movie that strike me as all-time classics, they’re all very good—a team of All-Stars without a Hall of Famer.
While The Nightmare Before Christmas is deliciously creepy for adults, it’s probably too much so for younger children. The Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland is now themed to this film during the holiday season. So if that’s a Disney attraction that you’ve still shied away from as an adult, this movie may be too much for you as well.
For the remaining majority, it’s definitely a film to watch if you’ve missed it until now. If you’ve seen it before, the overabundance of clever details make it worth watching repeatedly. With this viewing I noticed for my first time that when main character Jack Skellington was analyzing Christmas his chalkboard included a fraction with “chestnuts” as the numerator and “open fire” as the denominator. Fun stuff!
Onwards!
+ last viewed (4) 2025-12-21, HDX7, 1.85v, 2M (also viewed 2 more times in 3D)
+ first viewed 1993-10, ThX, 1.85, 2
+ 👻🧛👨👩👧👦🎈🎃⛄🎄🎅🎶🧌💀🌑🦄🧚🛡️🌑🥸🐾🐾🐶🦌🦌🕸️🕸️
Family Suitability Detail
+ ✅3️⃣ OK for older kids. (Grades 4+) | PGa
+ 😡+3 😵💫+4 🤬+3 🫢+3 🫣+4
Judeo-Christian Values Detail
+ ❎0️⃣ Neutral (No clear values of any type or ⚠️ includes both negative messages and positive messages, which balance out.)
+ ✝️ +0 ➕😇🩷 ➖🗿(🔮)
+ ✡️ +1 ➕(✡️)🌗🌗💎 ➖🗿(🔮)
+ 🗽 +0 ➕🚓(⬜) ➖🗿(🔮)
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