Chapter 1 Before the Nightmare The commonality among most great film raconteurs is their early love of the movies. Those seminal moments in a dark movie theater where their imaginations were captivated by the screen images playing before their very eyes: the “gee-whiz, how’d they do that” moments when fantasy and reality blend, creating a sense of awe and wonder. For a young Tim Burton, and many of the artists who worked on The Nightmare Before Christmas, some of those key inspirational moments came from the American-British visual effects designer Ray Harryhausen and the stop-motion animation of fantastical creatures he created for special effects–oriented fantasy films like
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and
Jason and the Argonauts (1963). “Growing up with Ray Harryhausen, that kind of stop-motion was a very, very strong thing,” reminisced Burton during a conversation we had in Los Angeles in 2017. As an animation technique, the stop-motion genre includes anything that requires a physical inanimate object to be manipulated and photographed frame by frame to appear as though it has come to life when the frames are run consecutively on film. Harryhausen’s process typically called for him to develop miniatures that he would then shape for each frame, meticulously managing the illusion of movement. “Jason and the Argonauts was one of the first cinematic experiences I ever remember as a child,” Burton said. “When you have a certain time in a certain moment, it’s just like a perfect storm. It stays with you.”
Burton is not alone in attributing Harryhausen as an emotional and motivating influence. Trey Thomas, a stop-motion animator on
Nightmare who continued his stop-motion work on
James and the Giant Peach (1996),
Corpse Bride (2005), and
Coraline (2009), and eventually became the animation director on Burton’s Frankenweenie (2012), agreed completely. “I was a Ray Harryhausen fan from back in the day. I was a little kid, and it just made a huge impact on me.”
Legendary music composer Danny Elfman, credited as associate producer on Nightmare, for which he wrote the original score, songs, and lyrics (and also performed the singing voice of the main character Jack Skellington), recalled that Harryhausen’s films were part of the initial common interests between Burton and himself. “We grew up in L.A.; we grew up in movie theaters. And we grew up on horror. We clearly connected on that level,” he believes. “There was this mutual intense adoration of Bernard Herrmann’s music and Ray Harryhausen’s
animation.”
“You know, it’s just beautiful,” said Burton of Harryhausen’s work.
“And it’s interesting because I showed it to my kids; I was curious to see
how they feel about Ray Harryhausen, with today’s eects, but they still like it. It just looked good.”
Appreciation for that timeless quality certainly contributed to the end result of
Nightmare, as did the clay-animation techniques of the California-based Art Clokey, known for creating cherished children’s television shows featuring the simple-but-effective Gumby (who debuted in 1955 and ultimately turned into a global phenomenon) and later, in 1961, with the Davey and Goliath series. For broader influences worldwide, Nightmare filmmakers also cited exposure to the National Film Board of Canada shorts of the 1950s that used the pixilation technique, in which live actors served as stop-motion props. Burton himself even ascribes to the influence of the Czech stop-motion animation director Karel Zeman, who created a 1945 short that combined animated puppets and live-action footage, as well as the Russian/Polish/ French stop-motion animator Ladislas Starevich, who created the first puppet-animated film,
The Beautiful Lukanida, in 1912. “That’s why I did
Vincent that way,” Burton said of his 1982 black-and-white short that used stop-motion 3-D models combined with hand-drawn animation. “It has a certain funky kind of handmade, crude charm.”
Of course, marrying stop-motion techniques with the spirit of the holidays was also influenced by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass—and their beloved television specials of the 1960s and 1970s. The Rankin/Bass stop-motion films like
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964),
Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970), and
The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974) were first broadcast while Burton was growing up in Burbank, California. Like
Nightmare now does, they each had a fascinating and eternal appeal that Burton admired. He even sought inspiration from some traditionally hand-drawn animated holiday specials of the era, like Frosty the Snowman (1969) by Rankin/Bass and
Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966), which served a perfectly balanced medley of rhymes from Dr. Seuss, co-direction by legendary animators Chuck Jones and Ben Washam, and narration by horror film star Boris Karloff. “Those Christmas specials had a huge impact on me growing up,” Burton said. “I was of that generation where we watched them every year.” And, of course, his genius lies in marrying the nostalgia of those Christmas films with Burton’s other favorite holiday, Halloween.
As a child, Burton describes himself as an introvert. And a fan of horror films; he often went to the local movie theaters by himself or sometimes with neighborhood friends. “I went to see almost any monster movie, but it was the films of Vincent Price that spoke to me specifically for some reason,” Burton said. “Growing up in suburbia, in an atmosphere that was perceived as nice and normal, but which I had other feelings about, those movies were a way to certain feelings, and I related them to the place I was growing up in. I think that’s why I responded so much to Edgar Allan Poe.” 1.1 In his formative years, Burton experimented with stop-motion “a little,” thanks to his high school art program. “I had a great teacher, Doris Adams, who encouraged her students to be creative and to follow their passion,” said Burton. In a video interview preparing for the 2011 Tim Burton exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Adams recalled Burton as her student. “I would go around [the classroom], see what people were doing, and I’d come to him. Here he’s doodling these wonderful figures, and I marveled at them.” Adams further noted, “He just drew. Everything you can’t imagine,
he drew.” 1.2
1.1 Burton, Tim, and Mark Salisbury, ed.
Burton on Burton: Revised Edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006; pg. 4.
1.2–1.3
LACMA Past Exhibitions: Tim Burton’s Art Teacher. Video uploaded 29 May 2011, www.lacma.org/video/tim-burton-s-art-teacher.
Copyright © 2023 by Copyright © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
