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    ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’: A Hit That Initially Unnerved Disney

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    The filmmakers look back on its 30th anniversary and recall how uncomfortable it made executives. They didn’t expect the celebrations around it today.“What’s this?” Jack Skellington sings excitedly when he first comes across Santa Claus’s snowy, colorful village in “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” That’s also what Disney executives asked with concern about the idiosyncratic stop-motion animation musical when they saw a rough cut.“Anytime you’re doing something like that, which was unknown: stop motion, the main character doesn’t have any eyeballs and it’s all music, what’s to feel comfortable about?” Burton said during a video call from London. “Of course they would be nervous about it.”Burton’s “Nightmare,” currently back in theaters to commemorate its 30th anniversary, is now more popular than ever: This weekend the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles is holding a series of live concerts around the film, Disney theme parks feature seasonal attractions inspired by its characters, and merchandise, from board games to housewares, abounds.But the eccentric and endearing movie wasn’t always a ubiquitous part of our holiday watch list. Back in October 1993, “Nightmare” was released not as a Disney title but under the studio’s more adult-oriented label Touchstone Pictures.“They were afraid it might hurt their brand,” the director Henry Selick said in a video call from his home in Los Angeles. “If they had put the Disney name on it right then, it would’ve been much more successful, but I understand it just didn’t feel anything like their other animated films.”Based on Burton’s original story and characters, the unusual picture was directed by Selick, by then a seasoned stop-motion artist with spots for MTV and a variety of commercials to his name. Burton’s frequent collaborators Michael McDowell and Caroline Thompson wrote the screenplay.Sally (Catherine O’Hara) and Jack Skellington. She was the subject of a sequel novel last year. Touchstone PicturesOver the course of its original run, “Nightmare” grossed $50 million at the domestic box office. And while that number is by no means dismal, it’s a far cry from Disney animated hits like “Aladdin,” which just a year earlier brought in $217 million from U.S. screens alone.At the time, Disney couldn’t figure out how to market the operatic saga of Jack, a lanky, sharply dressed skeleton, infatuated with bringing the wonder of Christmas to his monstrous friends in uncanny Halloween Town.Selick initially worried that the number of songs Danny Elfman had composed for the movie, a total of 10 tracks for the brisk 76-minute run time, would alienate viewers. In retrospect, he said, the memorable tunes were crucial to the film’s eventual success, once audiences connected with its unconventional rules of storytelling and design.These days Selick can’t go a week without running into a fan wearing a sweater, hat or other apparel emblazoned with “Nightmare” imagery.“This year there’s a 13-foot-tall Jack Skellington you can buy at Home Depot, and people have them on their lawns,” Selick said. “I like that because it’s pretty bizarre and extreme. That’s not just a T-shirt, that’s a real commitment.”For Burton, the character of Jack Skellington embodies a preoccupation common in his work over the years: the terrifying notion of being misunderstood. “The conception of it was based on those feelings growing up of people perceiving you as something dark or weird when actually you’re not,” he recalled.Selick compared the skeletal antihero’s amusingly manic behavior to Mr. Toad from the animated classic “The Wind in the Willows,” one of his favorite Disney protagonists. “I’ve always been drawn to characters like Jack Skellington,” Selick said. “He gets carried away with something new and goes way overboard with his enthusiasm.”Burton, who grew up in the Los Angeles area, where Latino culture has a strong presence, also holds a special affinity for Día de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday that embraces mortality as a natural part of life’s cycle. That was among his many inspirations for “Nightmare. ”The film was initially a modest hit that Disney released under its adult label, Touchstone.Touchstone Pictures“I always felt a connection to that celebration. People think of it as a dark sort of thing, but it’s quite light,” Burton said. “That’s where the juxtaposition of those feelings of dark imagery with more spiritual positive feelings connected with me very early in life.”For stop motion as a technique, “Nightmare” represented a watershed right before the advent of computer-generated animation. Selick credited the director of photography, Pete Kozachik, for introducing the tools that set the production apart, namely designing and building the rigs that allowed the heavy Mitchell film cameras to move a frame at a time.“That made the film so cinematic,” Selick said. “All the stop motion before had been done in lock shots or really simple little pans,” the mostly static visual language that limited other stories told in the same medium. But, Selick continued, “what Pete brought was this freedom of camera movement, which really turned it into a bigger movie.”While there was talk of turning his concept for “Nightmare” into a TV special or realizing it in hand-drawn animation, Burton — who as a child adored Ray Harryhausen’s creations and Rankin/Bass tales like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” — held out until there was a team to do it in stop motion.“If you’ve ever been on a stop motion set and you see its tactile beauty, it is like going back to the beginning of making movies in the sense that it’s all about artists making puppets, sets, there’s a feeling that’s unlike any kind of thing,” Burton said.Decades before he directed the stop-motion features “Corpse Bride” (2005) and “Frankenweenie” (2012), both of which earned him Oscar nominations for best animated feature, Burton dove into the painstaking technique with a 1982 short film, “Vincent.”“Other mediums are great, but for me that’s the most pure and beautiful one,” Burton added.Selick admitted that for a while the general public’s lack of awareness that he had directed “Nightmare” upset him. He’s now made peace with the lack of credit because this milestone in his career wouldn’t have happened without “Tim’s brilliance and ideas.”“I could still certainly win bar bets for the rest of my life,” he said with a cheeky smile. “‘For $20, who directed “The Nightmare Before Christmas”?’”The movie has inspired Disney theme park celebrations, concerts and merchandise.Touchstone PicturesFor Selick, one of the indicators that the movie had become a classic came a few years after the lukewarm reception to the theatrical release, but before Disney had fully embraced it. The director recalls children coming to his house trick-or-treating on Halloween night in homemade costumes of “Nightmare” characters before officially licensed versions existed.“I’d sometimes bring them in with their parents and show them the original figure of Jack as Santa in his sled with the reindeer that I kept, and they would just scream with joy,” Selick recalled while pointing his camera to the fragile figure in a glass display case.“It’s not really mine or Tim’s or Danny’s anymore,” Selick said. “It’s the world’s movie, and I kind of like that.”Since 2001, the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland has been transformed every fall into a “Nightmare”-inspired attraction known as Haunted Mansion Holiday. And each year, from early September through October, Disneyland holds the Oogie Boogie Bash, a Halloween party three nights a week featuring and named after the movie’s rambunctious villain.Burton believes these displays epitomize the film’s evolution from unclassifiable oddity to a uniquely beloved property. “When I see that, I go back to the early days when the film was first being done, and thinking of the journey that it’s taken, this symbolizes it in a very strange way,” said Burton.Selick added that he was invited the first year of the Haunted Mansion Holiday. “They didn’t try to turn it into one of their other characters,” he said. “They really got the aesthetic of the designs just right.”A sequel novel, “Long Live the Pumpkin Queen,” focused on Jack’s romantic partner, Sally, and a prequel comic, “The Battle for Pumpkin King,” were published in the last year. Yet three decades on, Burton maintained that the original animated film was a one-of-a-kind feat.“In a certain way that’s the beautiful thing about it as it is. It’s one movie. It’s stop motion and it tells its story. And that helps make it special for me,” Burton explained. “It’s its own thing, there aren’t five sequels and there’s not a live-action reboot.” More

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      Henry Selick and Jordan Peele Team Up on ‘Wendell & Wild’

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      The stop-motion animator and the horror writer-director collaborated on the screenplay for Selick’s latest darkly comic fable “Wendell & Wild.”Nearly two decades ago, the uncanny forces inside Henry Selick’s own home inspired him to summon the original concept for “Wendell & Wild,” his first stop-motion animated feature in 13 years, which is streaming on Netflix.“My two grown sons were once little kids who acted like demons sometimes, so I did a loose drawing of them as demons,” Selick, 69, said by phone. Based on that personal doodle, he wrote a seven-page story about the mishaps of two diabolical brothers, Wendell and Wild, trying to escape hell and come to the land of the living to become rich.To materialize this idea many years later, Selick, an accomplished animation veteran whose credits include “James and the Giant Peach” (1996) and “Coraline” (2009), joined talents with the comedian-turned-director Jordan Peele, long before “Get Out” positioned Peele as a hit-making genre storyteller. Their shared ability for weaving horror and comedy cohesively in their work made for great synergy in their artistic partnership.“The best thing about Jordan, besides that he’s a genius — as a comic, a writer and now as a horror director — is that he loves stop motion animation and he knows all about it,” said Selick. “Even the logo for his company, Monkeypaw Productions, is stop-motion animation.”In 2015, Selick approached Peele and Keegan-Michael Key about collaborating. A fan of their Comedy Central sketch show “Key & Peele,” the filmmaker thought the duo would make the perfect Wendell and Wild. They were both interested, but Peele wished to become further involved by helping to shape the narrative. He shares screenplay credit on the film with Selick.Selick, right, on the set of the film. Paul McEvoy/Netflix“When Henry reached out, he didn’t know I was already a huge fan of his, ever since ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas,’” said Peele during a recent call. “He is a modern-day Roald Dahl in how he can weave the humor and the horror into a whimsical and perfectly inappropriate package.”Originally, Sister Helley (voiced in the film by Angela Bassett), a nun battling supernatural entities at an all-girls boarding school, served as the protagonist of Selick’s story. But because of Peele’s desire for this creation to look and feel unlike any stop-motion vision he’d ever seen before, the spotlight shifted to Kat, one of the young pupils at this institution who lost her parents in an accident.Selick worried that after directing “Coraline,” making another humorously frightful fable centered on a young heroine would seem as if he were repeating himself. Ultimately, Peele’s argument to not only make Kat the lead but also to make her Black convinced the animator. Kat became the angsty Hell Maiden who ushers Wendell & Wild into our realm.Lyric Ross, who voices Kat, understood the unique significance of her character.“I thought her style, her hair, even her mean mug was dope,” said Ross. “I personally had never seen a little dark-skinned Black girl being in a stop-motion picture and being the star of it. I loved everything about her, down to her sick boots.”“I knew that if I had seen a film in Henry’s style featuring someone who looked like her, it would’ve been really life-affirming of my place in the world as a kid,” noted Peele.But when it came to the look of the characters Wendell and Wild, at first Peele and Key were hesitant of Selick’s intentions to use their likeness. It wasn’t until the director showed them the designs by the Argentine artist Pablo Lobato, who specializes in unique caricatures of celebrities, that their perspective changed.“Keegan and I spent so much time dressing up and doing all these characters on ‘Key & Peele’; in a way, becoming these animated demons felt like the ultimate dress up,” said Peele.From the conversations between Peele and Selick, another subject also grew in prominence in the film: the prison industrial complex as a malevolent force. As with his live-action efforts, Peele never sought to sermonize but only to spark dialogue about important social topics.Sweetie (voiced by Ramona Young), with Sister Helley (Angela Bassett) in the film. Selick decided to keep the face seams on the puppets instead of digitally removing them.Netflix “What we owe the younger generation is the ability to have the language and references that we didn’t have, so they can discuss all things,” said Peele. “I believe in pushing the boundaries of the art form for the sake of creating a bigger pool of understanding.”Although they didn’t set out to receive a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, Selick admits that they hoped for that classification because of the creative freedom it offered them. He recalls facing pushback from executives who argued a PG label would enable them to reach a wider audience. But he disagreed.“Let’s face it, a 10 or 11-year-old does not necessarily want to watch a PG movie,” said Selick. “They want to watch what their big brothers and sisters watch.”Kindred devotees of the bizarre, both Selick and Peele credit their mothers for their affinity for offbeat animation. Selick remembers his mother’s love for Halloween and watching “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” and the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of “Fantasia” with her.Similarly, Peele holds dearly to the memory of the night his mother took him to see Selick’s “Nightmare Before Christmas” as a teen. “My mother knew that this was going be a special film,” he said. “She even got me the toys for it, even before the movie came out.”With “Wendell & Wild,” Selick didn’t try to advance stop motion on a technical level but instead went back to basics. In aiming for a more raw aesthetic that showed how these worlds and characters are physically manipulated by the hands of artists, he decided to keep the face seams on the puppets instead of digitally removing them, as they did on “Coraline.”“I wanted to retreat to what’s at the heart of what we do,” said Selick. “We touch these things and we breathe a performance into them.” Peele agreed with that sentiment, describing stop motion as a technique that “appeals to something innate, magical and childlike in all of us.”“The craftsmanship Henry and his puppeteers perform is something very special that only few people know how to do,” added Peele. “He’s the best in the world at it.”Selick believes that it was Peele’s success with “Get Out” that allowed them to set up this movie at Netflix — the only company that promised them the resources to make it as they had envisioned it.“We’re cousins in a way,” Selick said. “Jordan is much younger than me, but he has a worldly knowledge of cinema and likes a lot of unusual, weird and fun things.”For Peele, the foundation of their fruitful bond was the mutual and sincere admiration between them. “We’re each other’s biggest fans,” said Peele. 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      ‘Wendell and Wild’ Review: Not Wild Enough

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      This devilish stop-motion horror comedy from Henry Selick and Jordan Peele can’t quite breathe life into its narrative.Why not try to resurrect the dead? Collect some demons in glass jars? Or summon a pair of demon brothers from among the “souls of the danged”? These seem like the ingredients for a wicked fun time.But the devilish new stop-motion horror comedy from Netflix, “Wendell & Wild,” can’t get these pieces to double, double, toil or trouble into a cohesive dish of entertainment.In the film, directed by Henry Selick, and written by Selick and Jordan Peele, a demon named Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and his brother, Wild (Peele), aim to hitch a ride up to the land of the living with the help of Kat (Lyric Ross), a teenage girl with a traumatic back story and a boombox called the Cyclops. Wendell and Wild hope to find a way to build an amusement park in the underworld that would put Six Flags to shame. However, Kat has her own plan for the demon siblings, and the repercussions soon spread to affect the whole town.From juicy grubs to booger sculptures to sticky gelatinous goo, “Wendell & Wild” exhibits the same charming, if grotesque, ghoulishness and delectable phantasmagoria of Selick’s other Halloween classics, like “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993), “James and the Giant Peach” (1996) and “Coraline” (2009).Key and Peele’s usually unstoppable humor and Selick’s signature combination of morbid terror and fanciful play, along with the film’s wonderfully diverse characters (including an Indigenous woman and a transgender boy of color) and its surprising sociopolitical messaging, seem like they’ll combine to make “Wendell & Wild” a new Halloween fave.But the story lines feel far-flung and disconnected, and the limits and rules of this world’s magical logic are at turns underdeveloped and inconsistent. Though the movie has a delightfully raucous rock ’n’ roll sensibility, the dialogue lacks the wit and punch to match.Every new character and narrative detail in the film — a mysterious janitor, a demonic teddy bear and a carnival of imps and fiends — is an unintentional red herring, not a purposeful misdirection but a residual of all the interesting places this film could have gone but never ventured.It’s especially disappointing given the ways “Wendell & Wild” does succeed — the imaginative visuals and playful character designs, of course, and an interesting protagonist in Kat, a Black punk girl with eyebrow piercings, green hair (about 160 hand-curled strands of wool, according to the press notes, to replicate her natural hair) and no-nonsense platform boots. And then there’s the headbanging array of tunes from Death, TV on the Radio and X-Ray Spex.You’d think demons would have the most fun. And yet, despite the countless courses “Wendell & Wild” could have taken, the route it does choose is, unfortunately, a dead end.Wendell & WildRated PG-13 for demons, zombies and things that go bump in the night. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More