A Sweet and Scary Treat

By RICHARD CORLISS

What's this? A Disney Studio cartoon with banshees baying at the moon! What's this? An animated feature where each creature wants to eat you with a spoon! What's this? Black hats, black cats, a pack of blackguard rats! And bats that function as cravats! What's this? In just a spooky second you'll be certain that behind the cartoon curtain it's not Disney, it's Tim Burton. And it's bliss!

Expect the impossible from Burton, whose directorial vision is uniquely odd and charming. His previous features -- Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns -- are outsider epics that locate a core of heroic melancholy inside grand gargoyle comedy. They invoke a child's giddy, chilly thrill of fear and wonder. Every Tim Burton film is Halloween and Christmas: ghoul scary and candy-cane sweet.

His new film, an animated fantasy called Nightmare Before Christmas, conjures up a fun house of funereal glamour. Part Grimm, part Gorey, part charnel Charles Addams, the movie traces the cataclysm that occurs when Pumpkin King Jack Skellington, creative director of Halloweentown, decides to have himself a buried little Christmas. Nightmare has a cunning screenplay by Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands, The Secret Garden) and is threaded with 10 witty Danny Elfman songs, which sound like Kurt Weill settings for Dr. Seuss verses. But the immediate and lasting impact is visual. Nightmare is the first major feature made in the glorious, laborious process called stop-motion animation, which brings a three-dimensional persuasiveness to the puppets that populate Burton's world. Stop-motion whiz Henry Selick directed from Burton's original story and sketches, but Burton, 34, is the film's most breathless salesman. "I just get rushes from it -- it's so beautiful!" he says with his usual frantic geniality; there always seems to be a stiff breeze agitating his curly hair, and in his head a torrent of images too baroque to be translated into words. "It's all texture you can touch. You feel the energy of things moving in real space; you feel characters in the actual light."

The full title -- Tim Burton's "Nightmare Before Christmas" -- is a shock, for this is a film from the Walt Disney Co. Before, only the founder got possessive credit. But now Burton, with two other projects at the studio, is heading what he calls "the Evil Twin Division" of Disney. And why not? He is a kindred, if loopier, spirit to Walt. He takes artistic risks that pay off by blending outlandish invention with sturdy sentiment. He is also the poet of the emotionally excluded. "((Tim and I)) both feel like outsiders," says Thompson, "and we love to do stories about what it feels like to be on the outside."

Welcome to Holiday World, a loose confederation of party towns, each in charge of a single day (St. Valentine's, St. Patrick's, Easter and so on). In Halloweentown, the local industry is genial fright, and Jack Skellington is the dapper master of the revels. Jack's face, a white bowling ball for a player with two thumbs, rests on a bat bow tie and a slim, elegant, tuxedoed frame. "He has a very nice balance of long arms and fingers," says Selick, "and he moves like Fred Astaire." But lately, nothing has set this Astaire astir. "There's an empty place in my bones," he moans in Elfman's superbly sarcophagal baritone, "that calls out for something unknown." If Jack weren't long dead, he'd be suffering a mid-life crisis.

When he stumbles down an immaculate hill into the bright smiles and lights of Christmas Town, he is like Dorothy uprooted from gray Kansas and crash- landing in her dream of Oz. "What's this?" he sings. "There's color everywhere./ What's this? There're white things in the air." Dazzled, he resolves to produce this pageant himself this year: to, well, kidnap Santa Claus and distribute Halloween-style presents under the tree. This superproduction will be Jack's Heaven's Gate. Everything goes wrong when he becomes the ghost that stole Christmas.

Nightmare can be viewed as a parable of cultural imperialism, of the futility of imposing one's entertainment values on another society. (Euro Disneyland might come to some minds.) The apolitical moral is: cultivate your own garden or graveyard. Don't try to be somebody else. Know your place and your strengths, and make the most of them.

Words to live by, and Burton always has -- even when he was an apprentice animator a decade ago at Disney. There he wrote the poem that was the source for this film, and there he met another renegade animator, named Henry Selick.

"I feel like Horton Hatches the Egg," Selick says, invoking the sacred Seuss. "I was given this egg from Tim and Danny and took it to San Francisco to turn it into something else." Selick -- who has made stop-motion magic in Pillsbury Doughboy commercials, MTV promos and his own, profoundly bent short film Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions -- assembled the team of stop-motion specialists, armature designers and puppetmakers. "The shooting schedule was about two years," notes David Hoberman, president of Disney's Touchstone division, who godfathered the project, "and Henry was up there every day keeping 140 people going strong."

Stop-motion is the most labor-intensive form of making movies. Imagine filming a stage play one frame at a time. The characters' armatures (bodies) must be created, costumes designed, sets built, dressed and lighted. Places, everybody! Action! -- for exactly 1/24th of a second. The camera stops, the animators scrunch over the set and give Jack, say, a new head with a subtly different expression, or move the figure's pipe-cleaner limbs a silly millimeter. And again and again: almost a hundred of these meticulous increments to get just four seconds of footage.

Skellington Productions, where Nightmare was shot, holds 20 miniature stages, all of which were busy in the final days of filming last summer. A notice on one of the walls was apt: no whining beyond this point. The work demanded an almost Zenlike concentration. "When you really get into a shot," says animator Mike Belzer, "your mind gets slowed down. You're thinking one frame at a time, and you start seeing everything in slow motion." As one crew member put it, "Nothing happened in real time on the set, except lunch."

Still, moviegoers don't care about the effort that goes into a film, any more than they go to see a picture because of its high budget (this one, says Disney boss Jeffrey Katzenberg, cost "not much more than $20 million"). They care about the effect. Nightmare, in its loving-friend story between Jack and Sally, a kind of Roald Dahl rag doll, has enough heart to win the Sleepless in Seattle crowd. More important, the film is packed with enough clever detail to give pleasure to anyone with intelligent eyes. You'll be scouring the corners of Burton's landscape to investigate the duck-billed latitude of an evil scientist's metal cranium, or to peer inside the burlap skin of the wormy villain Oogie Boogie.

The filmmakers' ordeal is over; their trick is ready. Your treat opens soon, at theaters near you. It's a banquet both utterly individual and very much indebted to the classic Disney cartoons. But with, as is Tim Burton's genius, a twist. In Snow White, a stepmother's sleek exterior hid a poison-apple heart. Here the outwardly grotesque masks good feeling and creative daydreaming run splendidly amuck. The film's both mental and experimental, more melodious than Yentl and at heart as soft and gentle as a Christmas kiss.

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles