My Seven Stages of Nightmare Before Christmas Reaction, Prompted by the New 4K Release (With Bonus Mermaid)

Ed Note — Luke is visiting us again with a 4k Review. This time he is reviewing the multiholiday classic Nightmare Before Christmas. Is it a Halloween film? A Thanksgiving film? Christmas? All of the above. His review begins with a wonderful framing that plays on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief.

Stage 1: Excitement

Wow, I thought, Tim Burton's drawings coming to life in stop-motion! I had loved Pee-wee's Big Adventure from the moment that opening breakfast sequence split my sides with hilarity. I loved Beetlejuice even more, if that was possible. I had misgivings about the comic fidelity of his Batman movies, but their aesthetic with unimpeachable. Edward Scissorhands – well, I was like every depressed teen who felt he was me, and again, the aesthetic ruled. So the notion of a full-on stop-motion Tim Burton movie starring a cast of monsters seemed too good to be true. I bought the toys in anticipation. And my excitement lasted through that first viewing of the movie...mostly.

Stage 2: Misgivings

Was it me, or did Sally kind of suck? (Don't hate me yet...this part was a 19 year-old me response, and as you'll see, it evolves) Barely sounded like Catherine O'Hara at all! And isn't Jack a bit of a wuss? For a scary skeleton, he has a singer's voice, and it sounds kinda wussy. Why is Oogie Boogie a bad guy in a town of monsters – shouldn't he be in charge? I'm not sure I love this like I want to....

Stage 3: Rejection

Damn it, this is Disney doing a straightforward stupid Disney princess movie and disguising it in spooky drag to sell endless merchandise to goths! This isn't cool! I was buying full into the Poppy Z. Brite critique of Tim Burton, that he masqueraded as an outsider but really celebrated conformity in the end. There's some substance to this: Burton's villains tend to be completely unfettered creatives with no sense of shame, while his heroes more often are loner underdogs who deep down do want to be loved and fit in. But there's more nuance as it applies to The Nightmare Before Christmas, as it would take me longer to figure out...

Stage 4: Comparison

After seeing several stage musicals, as opposed to movie ones, The Nightmare Before Christmas started to make a lot more sense to me. Unlike other Disney animated musicals, it's not simply a fairy tale with a few songs thrown in. Like live musicals, it's a combination concert/play, telling the story in songs, and using broad archetypes to make the characters instantly recognizable. Where many Disney movies simply use songs to express an emotion, NBX uses them to tell the story as well. Virtually every song in the movie is the exposition, with emotions conveyed more through dialogue. Most Disney animated features could lose the songs and the story would still work, but not this one. It's a musical experience, and must be assessed as such by anyone seriously looking at it.

Stage 5: Irony

Jeez, Jack's kind of a narcissist, isn't he? Really does not give a damn about anyone else. And Sally wants to go from one abusive father figure to a conceited, controlling boyfriend instead...will she wind up poisoning him regularly like her dad? This is a toxic relationship, and it's no wonder the same people who dress up as Joker and Harley Quinn love Jack and Sally – they're equally terrible examples of how to relate, while simultaneously being relatable to people who feel like weird introverted freaks and wish they could be uninhibited. The fact that this is all a Disney novie is kind of subversive after all.

Stage 6: Acceptance

Now that I feel like I get it, I watch this every Halloween.

Stage 7: Retrospection

Wait...so, Jack is a guy who wants to take a thing that everyone loves, doesn't fully understand it, wants to make it his own anyway, and puts a needlessly creepy spin on it that everyone ends up hating? Isn't that basically modern-day Tim Burton? Making Sally a Tim Burton groupie? The more I interrogate the notion of couples wanting to be Jack and Sally, the weirder the ramifications become. I know there'll probably be no direct sequels, but yeah, if they get married, she'll totally start poisoning his tea down the line, once he starts inevitably ignoring all her concerns again. This is probably how Johnny Depp and Amber Heard began.

There have been many DVDs and Blu-rays of NBX over the years, and the new 4K is not a complete compendium of all the extras – it's more a greatest hits, with one commentary track, the “Frankenweenie” short (but not, this time, “Vincent”), the featurette on the annual Haunted Mansion ride redeco, and a few more. Infuriatingly, if you buy this digitally and had a previous version in the digital collection, its extras may replace the extras of the previous version you had even if there were more. That, at least, happened to me. This is why physical media matters. If you love the extras you have and want to keep them, don't ditch your old disc. But should you buy the new one if you want the best version of the movie itself?

Yeah, you probably should. It can be hard to tell because there's a lot of fast POV movement in key sequences, but the level of detail captured here is about as good as it gets. Want to see minor wrinkling at the base of Jack's neck when he moves? Each individual hair on the witches' heads? Stray glue spots holding everything together? Then this is for you. And it doesn't break any of the overall illusion, either, since this is not a movie with many human characters.

At this scale, there are occasional focus issues – they're the sort of things I've noticed while photographing toys. At a macro scale, the focus has to be really specific sometimes, and in a shot or two the focus may be on something other than the primary item of interest. Having taken pictures of action figures and found that only one hand was in focus, I get it. It's not your eyes messing up. And it's a minor ding on the overall exceptional clarity.

While we're on the subject of stage musicals making me appreciate certain movies more, The Little Mermaid (2023) review copy just showed up, and it made me wonder just why we get so outraged over movie remakes, but not over new productions of favorite plays. (One imagines the forerunners of today's self-styled anti-wokesters having a tizzy the first time Shakespeare's female characters were played by actual women.) Nothing deletes the movie you like – the new one is a new interpretation and staging. Sometimes that can make things more interesting – I'm the rare cinephile who prefers The Lion King remake for all its technical innovations over the relatively standard Hamlet/Bambi in Africa cartoon fable.

Once you make the Disney version of The Little Mermaid into live-action, the Ariel role becomes insanely complex. She has to spend half the movie without talking, and the other half singing note-perfectly, and throw in a ton of choreography. A young pop star used to doing big stage shows is best-suited to that if she can act at all for the camera, and Halle Bailey makes it look easy. It's hard to imagine anyone fair-minded thinking she earned this role on anything but her ability, and as such, pulls off one of the best performances of the year. I'm not kidding. You try acting that part and all it entails, and making it look easy. Or tell me who else could – even if we disagree, I doubt you'll assemble a long list.

As for some of the other ridiculous non-troversies, Ursula's makeup colors are designed for the lighting in her scenes, as opposed t broad daylight, and work as such, and Awkwafina's supposed accent sounds like the way she normally talks, a New York blend that has traces of many heritages. As for “The Scuttlebutt,” it's a perfectly respectable comedic rap, but it seems some folks have decided it's time to turn on Lin-Manuel Miranda for the thing we used to be so impressed by. If you're bored of his style, okay...but he's still good at what he does.

Nobody in their right mind is asking you to replace the animated movie you like. But can you appreciate a creative restaging with a new cast and crew? In the theater, that would be a silly question. Onscreen, apparently, it isn't. There's nothing wrong with not liking it if it just doesn't work for you, but some of the standards social media was pre-holding this film to just struck me as nuts.