A Dark, Cold Night, and a Full Moon Sky
Attention. Attention, citizens. Terrible news. Although the imposter has been shot down, there’s still no sign of Santa Claus. It looks like Christmas will have to be cancelled this year. I repeat: The imposter has been shot down, but there is still no sign of the real Santa Claus…
What’s this?! A world that you wish you inhabited, a world to live in. Of two-faced mayors changing faces at a wink like a figure of ironical wit only tipping the balance in the favor of tragedy, scientists who ‘use’ their brains(and shift and reinstall them if desired), concoctions made out of reality, HALLOWEENTOWN is an eternal party till the hours stop rolling.
The Nightmare Before Christmas(1993)
Henry Selick-Tim Burton-Danny Elfman-Michael McDowell-Catherine O’Hara-Chris Sarandon
Jack, please, I’m only an elected official here, I can’t make decisions by myself!
DEADLY NIGHT SHADE in my soup, add in a little FROG’S BREATH, but only a little, I am the one for perfection you see.
Everyone is just about equally strange, and everyone is just about equally amoral.
If you didn’t know how HOLIDAYS started, follow me in the darkness.
And he flies like a vulture in the sky…
The creator, the scientist comes back to reclaim his invention, or call it creation.
“Don’t forget, you are my creation!”
And SKELETON JACK/JACK SKELLINGTON, The Pumpkin King falls down (or is it up?) like Alice would, in another of her mighty-schizophrenic-trips. And he lands up in a world ironical full yet devoid of life, unimaginatively titled CHRISTMASTOWN. JACK sees celebrations and colors all around. Now all this is too ALIVE, too HAPPY to believe. What’s this?!
There’s children throwing snowballs
instead of throwing heads
they’re busy building toys
and absolutely no one’s dead!
An unprecedented sense of wonder fills his bony soul as he gulps down the festivities in his odd-constricted-thick-knuckled-world-view. Like a haze, it passes soon, and JACK returns all starry-eyed and captured by the charms of Cold December Holiday Season. There is a fear that hangs in the air; the joy of innocence might soon engulf HALLOWEENTOWN in its obvious ambition. A scary thought, indeed.
So, like all good precedence of fair-justice and mayor-madness, a town meeting is convened, and JACK gives a little presentation of the horrors he had just been through…
“Like a most improbable dream, it is as real as my skull…”
“A dark, cold night, in a full moon sky….and the KING of that land, SANDY CLAWS!”
The scare-crows all jump in agony, the monsters let out gentle howls of disagreement.
Soon, the horrors and wonders of CHRISTMAS leave the innocent citizens of HALLOWEENTOWN in a mad fury. And all the CHRISTMAS artifacts are STUDIED in a laboratory, as the unbiased watcher hopes to charter the pursuit of an improbable meaning, drives a wild dream of insane proportions and horrendous dimensions. As the Gingerbread Man is being reacted against chemicals, an intrigue of yore is being planned in the kitchen, and as if all of this was an apparition, a BAND quietly plays the mysteries and humor of the night away at a distance in the castle yard. Watch out for that small man inside the bass…
The fated princess stitches life back into her ambitious escape. As she walks out, the mood changes to haunting jazz. ‘Something’s up with Jack..”
As the dawn breaks and wonder takes off a involuntary flight, CHRISTMAS continues to confuse the populace, and of course, poor JACK… “What is it, behind all that I see?!”
Something’s up with Jack! He has locked himself up!
And JACK, soon stumbles upon his own moment of truth..
“I can’t see it, but THAT doesn’t mean I can’t believe it….Why should they have all the FUN?!…EUREKA! EUREKA!!…This year CHRISTMAS will be OURS!!”
As the whole town gets busy with ‘constructing christmas’, the trio of LOCK, SHOCK & BARREL – the wily TRICK-OR-TREATER three of a kind-birds of a feather-now and forever suburban gang plan their own little PROJECT LET’S KIDNAP SANDY CLAWS(Kidnap the Sandy Claws,beat him with a stick,lock him up for ninety years,see what makes him tick). And to stay true to character, they cross their fingers as they swear allegiance, and nod their heads in agreement, and let out the villainous smirk, and…you know the works.
But as if their passion ate them, instead of getting the BIG RED LOBSTER MAN, they get the EASTER BUNNY. Bummer.
In the meanwhile, the countdown to HALLOWEEN CHRISTMAS is as hauntingly-fast as ever.
And all these little mischievous acts keep unfolding in parallel, as a larger sloping, falling, rising landscapes overlooks all of them and their hasty plans.
This CHRISTMAS is gonna be disastrous.
The Thrilling Trio finally captures Mr. Claus, and the torture begins..
Santa: [from in the bag] Me on vacation? On Christmas Eve?
Barrel: Where are we taking him?
Shock: Where?
Lock: [removes his mask] to Oogie Boogie, of course. There’s no where in the whole world more comfortable than *that*. And Jack *said* to make him comfortable, didn’t he?
Barrel, Shock: Yes, he did.
Santa: Haven’t you heard of peace on earth, and goodwill towards men?
Barrel: NO!
[laugh and head back to the tree house]
And we cut to the grand pre-climactic opera, This Time, while the devils gift-wrap their devilish plans, to scare the HALLOWEENS out of CHRISTMASTOWN.
And we cut to the ‘normal’ toys being made in CHRISTMAS town, almost mechanically, with no inkling of the danger that lurks at their doorstep.
And we cut to SANDY CLAWS being handed over to OOGIE BOOGIE, the fantastically-mad local-BOOGEYMAN, who knows his step and remembers his beat, a-la CAB CALLOWAY. This becomes a crazy psycho experiment in technicolor, the contrasts all go messy, the color schemes refuse to comply, the effects all go acid in a screaming moment of rebellion.
I am the shadow on the moon at night
Filling your dreams to the brim with fright.
Oh, the sound of rolling dice to me is music in the air,
’cause I’m a gambling Boogie Man, although I don’t play fair.
It’s much more fun, I must confess, with lives on the line.
Not mine, of course, but yours, old boy,
now, that’ll be just fine.
DEATH JAZZ, TORTURE BLUES!
OK, I need some CAB CALLOWAY.
Release me now or you’ll have to face the dire consequences.
The children are expecting me, so please come to your senses.
The effect, is telling, to say the least.
What follows once the Santa escapes the horrors of what-looked-like-an-entertaining-climactic-torture is not something you would kill for. I wouldn’t. It all became too placid.
One, JACK didn’t die. And didn’t live up to the promise of his ghoulish Santa-in-disguise riding the skeletal-reindeers-flying-sleigh-ride. I mean imagine the possibilities of tragedy..
“Look Zero, Searchlights. They’re celebrating, they’re thanking us for doing such a good job. ”
And instead, we get a ‘What have I done..”. Sad. Not done, for all the dark promises.
The King of Halloween has been blown to smithereens! Skeleton Jack is now a pile of dust!
Two, SALLY goes all Romantic Hopeful with her Jack Dreams Volume Two.
Three, Santa saves Christmas. Sob Sob…Happy Endings I guess…
A little further into the isolation, and the clock stops. Decades pass like nobody cared about them. The sky becomes bleak with possibilities of night. It is an empty hollow and lonely moment that stretches infinity.
“One of the design themes was ‘the power of three,’ which entailed using elements of that number. For example, a vehicle will have three or six wheels on it. We researched historical applications of props and machines, and then figured out how we could uniquely utilize them in our context.
“We looked to go even more acidic and post-apocalyptic than the short did. The lighting in 9 has a more theatrical than cinematic bent, and Shane is not afraid to use darkness to accentuate staging. It’s rendered all the more dynamic in terms of what these characters have to handle – given their forced perspective.”
Production Designer Robert St. Pierre
“It’s because of their size – they’re about 8 inches tall – that the ruins of what was our world are that much more formidable for them to navigate.”
Director Shane Acker
“By way of the movement and the framing, we wanted the audience to get involved in the film. The editing style is not all in-your-face fast cutting, and the camera moves are motivated.”
Editor Nick Kenway
“The editorial department is where the film begins and then ultimately ends. Everything was filtered through this department so that we could see how things played in context, and to make sure that all the different departments’ elements were coming together to tell our story.”
Director Shane Acker
“The palette is very narrow, and yet there’s a lot of color in it; rose-colored skies and dense red rust in a gray landscape, for example.”
Supervising animator Charlie Bonifacio
“When these characters come out of the darkness into the light, it is that much more powerful visually and from a storytelling point of view.”
Animation director Joe Ksander
“We wanted to have as little dialogue as possible.”
Screenwriter Pamela Pettler
“In so many of the characters he’s portrayed, audiences identify with John because he has this everyman quality. People feel that they can walk in his shoes, and sense that he leads with his heart. John’s voice conveys all that and more.”
Director Shane Acker on John C.Reilly
Acknowledgement:
Valerio Vega
vanishingkingdoms.com
Peace through science
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Excellent excellent, my dear man
the stuff of dreams
it seems
is not all naked woman and whipped cream
dreams run darker
there is hope yet
And there is hope yet…and naked women and the unmentionable too.
Excellent stuff again, i guess we need to form a Tim Burton’s Scary Nights Club soon. The baap of stop motion animation was however Ray Harryhausen IMO. Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans, Sindbad series( all childhood favorites). This is one of my all time favorite scenes
Awesome stuff man. Keep ‘em comin’.
BTW, I saw ‘Vincent’ again on your Burton article on Nightmare yesterday. What innocence man, it seems to be wiped from the present day world, but what innocence man…really classic stuff…
hey about the Tim Burton Scary Night’s Club.. we were actually planning something like it.. midnight to early dawn screenings in my office.. month of October.. Haloween month and all.. lets see if we can pull it out.. i’m working out logistics.. dead serious
Sounds like a great idea, get going on it.
Actually we cud have our own Haloween festival on PFC, blogs dedicated to horror stuff, what say u guys.
You are invited to walk on the carpet of blood.. don’t tell me later that i didn’t extend the invite.. carry a weapon and it better not be a gun.. use your imagination
@Ratnakar, I am totally IN. something like a halloween spooky ffilm festival on PFC would be awesome. totally dedicated to Horror….. yeah… some of the seniors at PFC should draft something up and post it.
count me in
Horror fest! well, that’s something that’s been like a domestic weekend ritual for weeks now. he he. but seriously I can join in, at my conditions of course.
I ll also work out somethin’…whatever is in my ‘reach’ or ‘domain’…heh heh
This is more like a Harryhausen crash course and someone had an ear for obvious music too
and those skeletons look like the ones I had in my technicolor daydream once. I let you in on it.
actually meant this when i wrote that.. the link got sucked into a portal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYz1J97kdE0
Great collection of scenes, and was that music by Bernard Hermann, he composed for Jason and Argonauts.
Guys.. gold.. fucking glittering blinding madenning GOld here:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve_2f2FPHtA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WTu6ps-mtk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmNMoJjBmXE
Mesmerizing article!!!
I love this film a lot that I have no words,
I love Halloween & face painting (my Avatar image)
2 of my PFCone films were inspired by these elements only !
Shekhar Bhai! aapka hi intezaar tha. Thanks. Check out Sid’s post too. And today I am working on something which you might like as well. Stay tuned
Vincent?
I’m very curious!!
No.
First Clue:
Though a long walk in the desert might end in a fortune,
sometimes the desert pulls out its guns at you.
And you do something
which noone would imagine.