The Nightmare Before Christmas · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch Jack's grin.

Not the plot, not the songs. Just the mouth on that white skull as it travels from courtly to delighted to sick with disappointment. It looks like a face bending. It isn't. It's one sculpted head lifted off and another set down, then another, a few hundred of them in trays in a San Francisco warehouse, and nobody agrees on the exact count. Jack Skellington has no expression. He has a library of them, and Henry Selick's animators played that library like a keyboard, one frame at a time, at a rate of a few seconds of finished film per animator per week, for about three years.

That drawer of heads is where Deleuze becomes useful.

His opening move in the Cinema books is an argument about what film did to movement. Older arts rendered motion through privileged instants: the posed climax, the discus-thrower at the top of his turn, the one moment chosen because it holds all the others inside it. Cinema gave that up. It takes any-instant-whatever, ordinary slices sampled at equal intervals, twenty-four a second, none of them more important than its neighbours, and produces real movement precisely by refusing to privilege any of them. Motion stops being a series of poses with gaps between. It becomes continuous.

Stop-motion puts both theses in the same room, which is why this film is worth thinking about and not just enjoying. Every replacement head is a privileged instant: a small sculpture, hand-finished, a pose that a human being decided on and approved. The entire labour of the production is then to strip that privilege away, to line the poses up and run them past a shutter until no single one can be seen. Sculpture goes in. Duration comes out. The tactile weight the dossier credits to the miniatures, the thing drawn or digital animation of the period couldn't match, is the residue of that conversion. You are watching hundreds of decisions being destroyed at speed.

Pete Kozachik lights the two worlds as if he'd read Deleuze's chapter on light, which he almost certainly hadn't. Halloween Town is expressionism in the strict sense: a gradient of shadow, hard keys, canted angles, leaning spires and spirals borrowed straight from the painted forced perspective of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Deleuze's phrase for what Expressionism discovers is the non-organic life of things, the sense that objects and shadows have an appetite of their own. In stop-motion that stops being a figure of speech. The things really are alive and really are not organic. An armature is a skeleton with nothing on it. Jack is that concept walking around.

Then he steps through a door and the lighting regime changes under him. Christmas Town is white, saturated red, snow, choral warmth: what Deleuze calls lyrical abstraction, the luminous alternative to the shadow-gradient, light alternating with whiteness rather than with dark. Jack doesn't discover a place. He discovers another way of being lit, and mistakes it for something he can pack up and take home.

Which is where his failure gets interesting. Deleuze describes the classical action film through the imprint, the bond by which a milieu and a character stamp themselves into each other until the character is legible as a piece of his world. Jack is the ceremonial Pumpkin King. The role is not a job, it's in the body. So when he sets out to reproduce Christmas from its forms alone, the imprint runs the machine: what comes out the other end is shrunken heads. His crime is not malice, it's earnestness applied through the wrong stamp. Sally, the rag doll, is the only one who sees it, and she sees it because she was also assembled and knows what assembly can and cannot produce.

Structurally the film is unashamedly a large-form action-image: a whole situation presses on a man, the man acts decisively, the situation is transformed and then restored. No hesitation, no drift, no dead time. What's new isn't the shape but the compression. Seventy-six minutes carry a cosmology of holidays, a romance, a heist and a redemption, and they carry it because Danny Elfman's ten songs were written and recorded before the animation existed. Stan Webb's cutting serves a musical architecture that predates the images.

Deleuze has a name for that too. In the musical, he says, the character's own movement passes over into a movement of world: the dancer stops generating the dance and starts being carried by it. Here the idea is almost embarrassingly literal. A puppet has no impulse. The score came first. An animator bends a figure of wire and foam to a beat recorded before that figure was built. Movement arrives from outside and passes through the body, which is exactly what The Skeleton Dance discovered in 1929 with skeletons choreographed frame by frame to the music, and what Fantasia raised to a method. Elfman sings Jack while Chris Sarandon speaks him, so the character's most interior register is voiced by the man who composed the world that moves him.

And there is the door. A stop-motion set is a closed set in the hardest sense: nothing exists past the edge of frame except a stage floor. Halloween Town is a perfect little totality that repeats every October 31 with the same bag of tricks, and Jack's boredom is the specific boredom of a system that has stopped opening onto anything. Deleuze insists the closed set always communicates with a larger changing whole, the Open. This film gives that a hinge and a doorknob. A circle of trees, each with a holiday carved into it, most of them never entered. The film's inciting event is a set discovering it was never closed.

Its debts are honest ones. Rankin/Bass supplied the grammar wholesale, armature-and-replacement puppets wrapped around a song-driven seasonal fable in Rudolph, and the gothic monster musical in Mad Monster Party?. Burton's own Vincent was the working prototype for spindly Expressionist puppet design. What it sent forward is simpler and larger: proof that a single-frame handmade craft could hold a feature and a mainstream release, made at the exact moment digital tools arrived, using motion control and early digital compositing in service of physical puppets rather than instead of them. Disney wouldn't put its name on it and released it through Touchstone. Within a decade it was among the most durable properties American animation had, and the modern revival of feature stop-motion still measures itself against it.

So watch the grin. Try to catch a head change. You won't, and that's the point.

Then ask the question the film seems not to know it's asking. Jack copies Christmas's shapes without the feeling that made them, and it comes out wrong. Animation copies life's motion without the life, and it comes out right. What's the difference, and is Sally the only character in the film who understands it?