This one had managed to get by me until now, and it was as much of a treat as I'd always anticipated in that vague way of mine. One thing that I hadn't realised - and which would've sharpened that anticipation - is that it's a musical (in the way that animated films often are); another thing which I hadn't known is that Disney is the studio behind the film. But of course the main event here is the Tim Burton thing, and on that score it's exactly what I'd expected - deft morbidity and grotesquerie, splashed with colour and wit and general vim, and populated by characters who are all recognisably human, even if they also happen to be skellingtons, stitched-together dolls, or other escapees from the menagerie of our collective nightmarescapes (ha, ha).
Writing this is making me think, though, about just what it is about Burton characters (at least his central protagonists). They always feel real, in a way that the characters in a film like, say, The Royal Tenenbaums only kind of do. One feels that there are actual emotions and feelings driving them - for all of their (literally, in this case) cartoonish appearances, they never seem opaque or truly alien (whereas I find a lot of people I know in real life to be quite alien, for example, including some with whom I get along really well).
A'course, that's not to say that Burton's characters are somehow more truthfully rendered than Anderson's. Truth is a multi-faceted thing, and I thought that there was a lot of truth in the characterisations in another film about extremely opaque people which I saw earlier this year, Intolerable Cruelty. There's a difference between understanding someone in terms of 'getting' what's going on 'inside', and understanding them in terms of knowing how they respond to certain stimuli (a 'black box' picture), and I'm not sure that the first is necessarily more profound than the second. But I think that what I mean to say, maybe, is that I can always quite directly identify with Burton's main protagonists (and, let's face it, this is what I'm talking about when I talk about truth, right?).
So that's not going to surprise anyone, least of all me. Am I surprised that this principle should also operate in relation to an animated film - and not one with any notable aspirations to realism, at that? Not really, but a little bit. Emotional responses to animated films are nothing remarkable - for me, this goes at least back to primary school and An American Tail (did I spell that correctly?) - but direct identifications are perhaps just a little bit so (Daria?). Then again, Jack Skellington is a character outline in pretty broad brush strokes, so how much of myself do I really see in him? Maybe it's like reading one's horoscope in the newspaper and being astonished by its accuracy. Then again, maybe the animation form allows a distillation of what's always going on with any identification with Burton characters, or even cinematic characters period.
Anyway.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is very sweet and amusing and made me feel better about everything. The tunes are a bit unmemorable but there's not much else to criticise, and besides, it's the sort of film that one doesn't want to criticise. I liked the trick-or-treaters, and basically everything else about it. And okay, I did identify quite a lot with Jack. So there.
