StrangeScaffold
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The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993 film) = Finished
🕑 Added 2018-12-02 07:56:19 +0000 UTC When Tim Burton was still a wee animation student at CalArts, he saw the newly-debuted Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. A few years later, he had made his first short film at Disney--a success--and created a poem that would form the genesis of The Nightmare Before Christmas.I think you can see where I'm going with this.
Though it was directed by Henry Selick, and finally produced as a movie a significant time later, you can clearly see The Nightmare Before Christmas as one of Sweeney Todd's twisted-but-beautiful children. The musical approach is absolutely the same. There is never a point at which one song ends, or another begins. They shift and evolve into each other.
However, as a musical, The Nightmare Before Christmas is undoubtedly weaker. Despite being 76 minutes long, it feels far longer--losing the effervescent pacing which was Sweeney Todd's chief structural strength.
I did some thinking about it, and I believe this might be why:
The songs of The Nightmare Before Christmas are locked into a near-constant staccato. In isolation, this means every song has a nice, fun, driving pop, and tells their segment of the story with potent lyricism. In sequence, combined with a Sweeney Todd-esque ceaseless weaving of rhythm across the film's runtime, the effect is fatiguing. A musical stream of consciousness. It's difficult to identify dramatic motifs and auditory callbacks - ones that could substantially boost the emotional impact of the story - because the cadence of these cues are all cut from the same mold.
The variation I now see is necessary to pull off this effect just isn't there.
What you do have, is a gonzo world of holidays and tangible, utterly grounded magic. This magic--the essential power of perspective--is what I'll take with me long after the last notes of the blurred-together soundtrack fade away.
