Copyright © 2010 by James Clark
Though retail displays for Halloween are crisply displaced by Christmas decor on November first, there is amidst the quite drastic change of atmosphere an almost seamless continuity in the plunge toward amusement and thrills. But for adamant partisans of each celebration, there is a world of difference harboring a world of pain.
Tim Burton has given us his take on that war of the worlds not in a normal, live-action dramatic format, but in a film animating artworks by “stop motion” processes. Insofar as pliable figurines are photographed at minute stages of “motion,” with the stages run together, twenty-four poses comprising one second of movement on the screen, Burton has introduced a tissue of dynamics with a ghostly downdraft. The players of such a presentation would be physically dogged by a coagulation against which their impetus would struggle in a virtually imperceptible way. This subliminal, kinesthetic factor constitutes the engine by which the drama of partisanship in The Nightmare before Christmas (1993) takes shape. (An adjunct to this inventory is the recent 3-D formatting, which enhances the bite of motion, particularly that of the long-limbed protagonist, and especially as set in relief by expanses of sky or a bright, full moon.) (more…)