'This is Halloween'
By Lael Loewenstein
It's Halloween again, and that means it's time to rent last year's feature smash, Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. An astonishing combination of ghouls, effects and stop-motion technical wizardry, the recently-released video is the perfect Halloween treat.
The story of Jack Skellington, spiritual leader of Halloweentown, and his misguided attempts to kidnap Santa Claus and highjack Christmas, Nightmare is the product of Tim Burton's warped imagination.
Burton dreamed up the idea over a decade ago while he worked as an animator at Disney. Once the director had achieved success with Beetlejuice and Batman, he was able to secure financing for his darkly comic animated vision.
The film's grueling three-year production process was made easier only through the collaboration of a talented team of production designers, animators and camera operators. While Burton supervised the production, director Henry Selick and his crew assembled an unforgettable work.
Nightmare's director of photography Pete Kozachik recently spoke with The Bruin about his experience on the film. He recalls that while Burton wasn't always on the set, his presence was palpable.
When Kozachik and art director Deane Taylor first sent images from the cheery Christmas sequence to Burton, then working on Batman Returns, Burton insisted they make it darker. They continued to send him dailies until, "finally," says Kozachik, "(Burton) got that I got it."
Burton's legendary quest for perfection was infectious, and the crew worked arduously to film each shot, blending a motion-control camera and stop-motion puppet animation techniques. While this process had been used as far back as 1904 in George Meliès' short film A Trip to the Moon and more famously in King Kong (1933), Nightmare was the first film to exploit the full potential of stop-motion animation and a movable camera.
So difficult was the process that even after detailed storyboarding, it could take up to a week to film a single shot. "The Holy Grail for the crew was to get one shot, from start to finish, in a day," says Kozachik. "That almost never happened."
Kozachik worked closely with director Selick and Burton to craft the look of the film. Together they discussed the kinds of films they wanted to emulate, especially crime films from the 1940s. The chilling film noir Night of the Hunter was a particular influence.
"Although we were shooting in color, we wanted to capture the feeling of a black and white film," Kozachik says. "(Nightmare) has a strong sense of gray values and contrast. We used lighting, not color, to separate and define space, like those older films." Along with the warped and twisted sets, influenced by German expressionist films, the deliberate low key lighting helps to evoke the eerie mood of Halloweentown.
Because Kozachik had previously worked with Selick on animation projects for MTV, the cinematographer and director had a fruitful and comfortable collaboration. The two next plan to adapt the Roald Dahl story "James and the Giant Peach" for the big screen.
Kozachik recalls that one of the greatest honors bestowed upon Nightmare was that American Cinematographer dubbed it "the most retro" film of the year, for its look, its feel and its incomparable use of stop-motion animation. "That," says Kozachik, "was exactly what we'd hoped for."