The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Here's the honest truth: I respect The Nightmare Before Christmas more than I enjoy it. And I've sat with that feeling long enough now to know it isn't going to change. There's a version of me that wants to be swept away by it, that wants to feel what millions of devoted fans clearly feel every time they revisit Halloween Town. But the spell, for me, never quite takes hold.

Which isn't to say the craft deserves anything less than admiration. The stop-motion animation is genuinely extraordinary. Every stitch on Jack Skellington's bony frame, every cobweb-strewn corner of Halloween Town, every curl of smoke from a crooked chimney, it all represents an almost incomprehensible amount of painstaking human effort. You watch it and you think about the hands behind it, the weeks spent moving tiny figures fractions of a millimetre at a time, and you feel a real warmth for the people who made it. Visually, it's a world unto itself, and that fusion of Halloween and Christmas iconography was genuinely unlike anything else in 1993. Nothing quite looked like this. Nothing quite looks like it now.

But here's where I have to be straight with you: admiration for craft and genuine emotional engagement are two different things, and this film mostly gives me the former. Danny Elfman's songs are inventive, catchy in places, and you can hear the theatrical energy behind them. Yet somewhere around the midpoint, they start to blur into one another. The theatrical bounce, so fresh in the opening numbers, begins to feel like the film cycling through the same gear repeatedly, and there isn't quite enough narrative momentum underneath to carry you through. At 76 minutes, it still manages to meander.

Jack himself is the real problem for me. He's a striking creation visually, one of animation's great silhouettes, but as a character he's curiously flat. His restlessness is established early and often, but his arc circles back almost exactly to where it began without much genuine emotional growth along the way. The romance with Sally, which should provide some grounding warmth, feels undercooked, her feelings for Jack mostly telegraphed rather than earned. And then there's Oogie Boogie, who arrives so late and departs so quickly that he barely registers as a proper threat. It's as though the film is more interested in its own gorgeous imagery than in giving anyone something to actually do.

What you're left with is something closer to a beautifully crafted extended music video than a fully realised story. A series of striking tableaux, one after another, atmospheric and stylish and undeniably original, but without a compelling emotional engine running underneath them. I kept waiting to be moved and kept finding myself merely impressed instead.

I had a similar feeling watching Coraline, another stop-motion fantasy with extraordinary visual invention, though I'd argue that one has stronger bones beneath its surface (no pun intended). And if you want gothic atmosphere done with real narrative purpose, Cemetery Man from around the same era is a wilder, stranger ride that earns its weirdness more fully.

None of this is to say the film is bad. It absolutely isn't. Its legacy is secure, its influence vast, and I understand completely why it became the seasonal institution it is. For a lot of people, this is a treasure, something they return to every autumn with genuine affection, and I don't begrudge them a single viewing. But I can only tell you what I actually felt watching it, and what I felt was a kind of distant appreciation rather than love. A handsome, melodic trifle from a filmmaker at the height of his aesthetic powers, working with collaborators of extraordinary skill, making something that looks like nothing else but never quite made me feel very much at all.

Two and a half stars.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 1993  | Watched: 2026-04-07

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Henry Selick: Coraline (2009)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More fantasy: Viy (1967) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)