The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993 film) = Finished

When Tim Burton was still a wee animation student at CalArts, he saw the newly-debuted Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. A few years later, he had made his first short film at Disney--a success--and created a poem that would form the genesis of The Nightmare Before Christmas.

I think you can see where I'm going with this.

Though it was directed by Henry Selick, and finally produced as a movie a significant time later, you can clearly see The Nightmare Before Christmas as one of Sweeney Todd's twisted-but-beautiful children. The musical approach is absolutely the same. There is never a point at which one song ends, or another begins. They shift and evolve into each other.

However, as a musical, The Nightmare Before Christmas is undoubtedly weaker. Despite being 76 minutes long, it feels far longer--losing the effervescent pacing which was Sweeney Todd's chief structural strength.

I did some thinking about it, and I believe this might be why:

The songs of The Nightmare Before Christmas are locked into a near-constant staccato. In isolation, this means every song has a nice, fun, driving pop, and tells their segment of the story with potent lyricism. In sequence, combined with a Sweeney Todd-esque ceaseless weaving of rhythm across the film's runtime, the effect is fatiguing. A musical stream of consciousness. It's difficult to identify dramatic motifs and auditory callbacks - ones that could substantially boost the emotional impact of the story - because the cadence of these cues are all cut from the same mold.

The variation I now see is necessary to pull off this effect just isn't there.

What you do have, is a gonzo world of holidays and tangible, utterly grounded magic. This magic--the essential power of perspective--is what I'll take with me long after the last notes of the blurred-together soundtrack fade away.