Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas
September 2008 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: Blu-ray	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Who but an off-center genius like Tim Burton could have the idea to marry two very different holidays, Halloween and Christmas, in the first place? While working at Disney as an animator, Burton penned a poem that incorporated portions of "The Night Before Christmas." In it, a skeleton becomes bored with the rigors and frights of Halloween, discovers Christmas, kidnaps Santa Claus, and sets himself up as a replacement. The macabre gifts he constructs to give to kids (most of them have snapping teeth) do not cause joy, and the skeleton, later to be known as Jack Skellington, is shot down as he flies by in his coffin hearse pulled by skeletal reindeer.

Burton presented the idea to Disney, but it was thought too dark. He left Disney, made the hits Beetlejuice and Batman, and Disney was happy to revive the idea of a stop-animation film that merged Halloween and Christmas. The result was a 76-minute wonder that did well at the box office, pleasing all audiences. It has been popular on DVD as well, but has not been properly treated. There have been two releases, but neither was anamorphic and thus not particularly sharp and clear. This brilliant Blu-ray makes up for past injustices and is a must-have disc for any collection.

The 1.66 image is properly presented, though most monitors will have so much overscan they will present it as a full 1.78:1. The picture is incredibly sharp, without a bit of edge enhancement that I could notice. Christmas Town colors are bright and cheerful, of course, with lots of reds and greens, while Halloween Town is all rich oranges and browns and blacks. There are lots of shadows there, and the shadow detail is exemplary. Almost every scene has a depth that makes it very realistic. One actually is going to feel like he could reach right out and touch one of the stop-motion puppets.

The sound is just about as good as the picture. It’s a very busy mix that uses the entire 360-degree soundfield to maximum effect. It is not just sound effects that come from the rears. There’s a lot of music there, and a lot of bass. I had a wall adjacent to one of my rear speakers that started to buzz and had to turn down the volume a bit. The dynamic range is very great, so you might want to do the same. Once a good balance for your room is accomplished, you’ll hear dialogue, music, and effects with equal ease.

The past DVD releases had some good extras on them, and most of those have been ported over to this Blu-ray. The two short Tim Burton black-and-white movies, Frankenweenie and Vincent, are both here and still delightful fun. Frankenweenie, a live-action film that Burton is remaking right now as a stop-motion animated feature, got me to thinking about Burton and pets, notably dogs. Frankenweenie is a story of a young boy who brings his pet dog back from the dead. In The Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skellington has a pet dog that’s a ghost, and in The Corpse Bride there’s a skeletal pet canine. There does seem to be a pattern of some sort there. Though the black-and-white short masterpieces are not HD, they upconvert to look very, very good.

There’s a better-than-usual documentary on the making of the film, cut in half from the long one that was on the laserdisc release of the movie, and a lot of storyboard comparisons, concept sketches, and the like. For those who care about that sort of thing, there’s a second disc here that offers a digital-file copy of the movie. I don’t know anyone who uses these, and Disney charges extra for the second disc.

There are some new features made for and presented in HD. One is a bust, the other a masterpiece. The former is a touted introduction to the movie by Tim Burton. It’s only 18 seconds long and just a "Hiya, hope you enjoy it" deal. The other presents Burton’s original poem narrated by Christopher Lee, to new animation based on Burton’s original preproduction sketches. The video has the look and Lee has the voice; you don’t want to skip over this one. There’s also an HD commercial for Disney’s Haunted Mansion Holiday Tour. You can turn on video trivia pop-ups for it, but they fly by so fast that they’re pretty hard to read.

My only complaint with this title is that it takes a lot time to load yet still takes time between functions if, say, you are backtracking to the main menu. And there are a good half-dozen promos at the beginning. Disney has started producing DVDs such that you can click the menu button and bypass the promos, but not so on this Blu-ray Disc. You’ll have to chapter skip them one at a time. A shame, because this is a movie you want to get to right away.

All in all, a very good start for Disney in presenting animated classics on Blu-ray Disc. The next one will be the fall release of Sleeping Beauty. If it is done as well as Nightmare, it might even be reason enough for the uninitiated to buy a Blu-ray player.

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