The
Nightmare Before Christmas tells the tale of Jack Skellington, the leader of
the residents of Halloween Town, who comes in contact with a similar yet
completely foreign city: Christmas Town.
In attempting to understand their foreign culture and customs, Jack
decides that the citizens of Halloween Town should bring the joys of Christmas
to everyone in the world instead, leading to disastrous results. By analyzing the film’s appeal to nostalgia
in both content and form, the film’s themes of the dangers of cultural
appropriation and
The
film becomes a metaphor for cultural appropriation, and the dangers of
appropriating elements of another culture without properly contextualizing it
or fully understanding its role or purpose within the foreign culture. When Jack and his Halloween friends attempt
to recreate Christmas through their distorted, creepy lens, it leads to
disaster. All of the
The film’s stop-motion animation is also a
callback to a more nostalgic era of animation history. Films such as the Rankin/Bass Christmas
Specials such as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus is Coming to
Town. By the 1990s, stop-motion films
had all but been abandoned in Hollywood.
Jack attempts to analyze several iconic Christmas elements and
ions. He dissects a teddy bear,
dissolves a Christmas ornament in chemicals, cuts a paper snowflake in the
shape of a spider, crushes mistletoe under a microscope while attempting to
study it, and draws complicated Christmas equations on his chalkboard. He attempts to understand the emotional with
the logical and analytical, and this is where his
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