Team Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas

To celebrate All Hallow's Eve, this month's post will look at the concept of authorship in relation to a Halloween favourite of many, the misleadingly titled Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. I'm intending to start a series of posts exploring the complexities of film authorship next month, and so it seemed appropriate to use Tim Burton, the most dubious of film auteurs, as a prologue to this.

In some ways, Burton is a prime example of the initial iteration of the 'auteur', the term Francois Truffaut used to describe a film director whose personal stamp could be seen in the finished film thanks to a recurring set of stylistic and aesthetic motifs. And it's certainly true that one can often identify a Tim Burton film just by looking at it (or even just the poster, in fact). There are certain characteristics that we expect in a Burton film, an almost unconscious checklist that audiences carry in the backs of their brains when going to see one of his films.

Another reason I evoke Truffaut rather than just the general concept of 'authorship' is because, for him, one of the defining features of the Auteur is that they express their personal vision while working within the confines of the Hollywood system. Anyone can make a personal film if they're being funded by an arts council or creating a personal avant-garde piece in their home, but to achieve it while working with a team of hundreds, with studio executives and producers looking over your shoulder, insisting that you make the film as appealing to as wide an audience as possible in order to increase box office revenue - well, that takes a very clear and uncompromising vision, says Truffaut.

Because Burton is very much a Hollywood director with a clear and distinct visual stamp on his films, there would appear to be no reason to describe his authorship as 'dubious'. But this is where Nightmare Before Christmas comes in. Before writing this post, I did a quick search through some message boards and found that to this day - 21 years after the film was released - there are still people who believe that Tim Burton directed Nightmare. The mistake is easy to understand - his name's above the title, after all - but I'm always a little depressed by how little attention people pay to the credits. Do people's brains really just switch off the second the story ends? After Jack and Sally embrace and the camera pulls back, the screen goes black and there - in large white letters - is the phrase 'Directed by Henry Selick'. I'm genuinely baffled by how people can watch the film year after year, and claim to be huge fans of it, and yet not pick up on this.

But the purpose of this post is not to rant about Burton 'stealing credit' from Selick, or how the film is good only because it was directed by Selick instead of Burton (there are plenty of other people doing that on the internet), rather it is to demonstrate that the idea of authorship in film, of identifying a 'personal stamp' in a film, can be far more complicated that we might first think.

It's certainly true that Nightmare is Burton's baby; an idea for a 20 minute television special that he concocted while at Disney, alongside the original Frankenweenie, the utterly bizarre Hansel And Gretel and a host of unrealised projects (two of the most interesting of which would be Trick Or Treat and True Love). The original story and character designs were by Burton and it's here where we can most obviously identify his fingerprints - a tall willowy figure wanting to break away from the confines that society has placed on him, an inherent trait that prevents them from being able to achieve their immediate desire, a host of bizarrely proportioned creatures, architecture with funny angles and a recurring use of black and white stripes and checkerboard patterns.

But the finished film is just over 70 minutes, not 20, and Burton neither expanded the story, wrote the screenplay or directed the action himself. Although we can say that the central theme of the film and the overall aesthetic are his, the idea that any other aspect of the film belongs to Tim Burton the individual becomes a little stretched. First, the original story was adapted by Michael McDowell, whose main output has been writing episodes of horror anthology shows such as Tales From The Darkside, Monsters and Alfred Hitchcock Presents... as well as co-creating and co-writing the screenplay for Burton's Beetlejuice. The shifting of the story into a longer format was the result of McDowell, including the addition of the love story with Sally and the villain Oogie-Boogie. The screenplay itself was written by Caroline Thompson, best known for two other Burton scripts Edward Scissorhands and The Corpse Bride as well as several adaptations of children's literature.

Burton was still involved in the development of his story into full screenplay, but he had now become the 'producer leaning over the shoulder' who Truffaut considered an obstacle that had to be overcome. And we must also take into account Selick's claim that the film was largely improvised during the animation process, using Thompson's script only as a loose guideline. The story is already three-steps removed from Burton and yet, because of the core theme and aesthetics, we can still identify the piece as a Burton work.

But surely it's more accurate to just describe Burton as the 'original author' of the work - in much the same way that Dr. Seuss is the original author of The Lorax but had little to do with the expansion of the story into a feature film (for obvious reasons). Why do we credit Burton for the finished film and not just the initial source material? Part of the reason is because both McDowell and Thompson have worked with Burton before (and after). As writers they have a fairly good understanding of what boxes to tick in order to give something a 'Burton' feel. This, of course, is not authorship but rather a kind of work ethic, a shared idea originated by an individual but executed by many. What we think of as the work of Tim Burton is really the work of the Tim Burton Team, several talented people consciously evoking the expected style.

Another important point worth noting about the expansion of the story: 30 minutes of the film's runtime is taken up with songs (and that's not including reprises). Arguably the film's most important storyteller is Danny Elfman. While in a standard Disney musical, the 70 minutes would contain maybe five or six songs, Nightmare has ten. And while ordinarily the purpose of a musical number is to condense story time - the use of music in 'Part Of Your World' expresses Ariel's emotional state far more succinctly than dialogue alone could - Elfman's songs are largely about expansion. Scenes such as the town meeting or Jack's Christmas experiments could have been half the length if their subject matter were just stated through characters. This is not a criticism (it's not that the songs are 'padding'), it's to emphasise how the story is told more through music and movement than through words.

Elfman is of course a hugely significant factor in the 'Burton feel' of many films, from Beetlejuice to Batman, from Pee-wee's Big Adventure to Big Fish, and the amount of work put into the film by him seals the deal for many that Nightmare must be a Burton film. So, not only is the story the result of four other people in addition to Burton, but the atmosphere created through the soundtrack is also the result of our associating Elfman with the director rather than anything that Burton himself has done. On top of this, there is the 'look' of the film to consider. We have already discussed how the aesthetic elements of the film are recognisably that of Burton - we could take a still from any moment of the film and be able to identify it as coming from his mind. But a film is more than still images, it is about how those images flow together to create movement - the 'look' of Nightmare is just as much about cinematography (the way in which the camera interacts with what's in front of it) as it is about character design.

Selick's personal stamp is most easily seen in the cinematography of the film; the way in which the camera navigates the spaces of the scenes are what most obviously draw comparison with James And The Giant Peach and Coraline. Take the opening sequence, 'This Is Halloween', for example. A casual viewer might only see the 'Burton-ness' of the scene, seeing the curved walls and wonky corners of the streets and buildings, the colourful creatures of Halloween Town, and the atmosphere created by Elfman's song, and make connections with other early films such as Pee-wee and Beetlejuice. But a more canny spectator will look at how the camera moves through the scene, how it skirts passed the scarecrow just as the wind spins it around, how it drifts through the street as each character sings their piece, and most strikingly how it circles around the effigy that reveals itself to be Jack Skellington in his big entrance, and see the hand of Selick at work. One aspect of stop-motion animation that often gets completely taken for granted is that camera movement has to be animated as well. The camera doesn't just float through a scene as animators busily attend to the character models. The movements just described above would have had to have been created frame-by-frame in conjunction with the character animation. This is a level of elaborateness that we often find in Selick but rarely find in Burton.

As this post has already run far longer than I intended it to, I shall quickly reiterate my main point about film authorship: when we think about the look or feel of a particular director's body of work, what we are really thinking of is not a personal vision or expression by some genius individual. Rather it is a collaborative work resulting from several parties all working towards a common artistic goal, a goal that it often shaped by the individual whose name appears above the title, but which is realised by the talents of many artists. When we think about the distinctive 'Guillermo Del Toro look' what we really mean the work of Del Toro's recurring team of designers (Mike Mignola, Wayne Barlowe, etc.) and production crew (such as cinematographer Guillermo Navarro) rather than just the director himself. But much as a band will be overshadowed by their front-man/woman, a film's production crew will often be overshadowed by the single person that we associate with that particular style - even when the person had precious little to do with the actual production of the film.

Happy Halloween!

                                                                                                                             - P. S.