I finally caught up with the 3-D reissue of Nightmare Before Christmas yesterday. I'd been avoiding it because I was afraid the digital trickery involved in converting the film to 3-D would screw with the integrity of the beautifully-rendered stop-motion. I had a couple quibbles (and at least one line of dialog is inexplicably missing), but mostly impressive.
I'd also been avoiding it because when Nightmare came out back in 1993, it instantly became one of my favorite movies ever. I saw it repeatedly in the theater, and shelled out a hundred bucks for the huge laserdisc boxed set. I gorged on it back then, but quite honestly, I haven't seen it in at least ten years, and I doubted I could have the same enthusiasm.
Surprise, surprise: Nightmare looks better than ever, endlessly inventive, a marvel of staging and design. It was originally released two years before Toy Story changed the face of animated films forever. If you believe the hype, in this age of CGI and Motion Capture, anything should be possible on film. Yet recent animated features have been so thuddingly literal in trying to capture the feel of the real world, they've completely forgotten the greatest power of the form: to create a world we haven't seen.
Here's the trailer for what, sadly, may be the future of animation:
Why are they bothering? Why give us, for instance, a mo-capped simulation of naked Angelina Jolie when the fanboys most likely to see this would rather see the real thing? Has anybody ever said, "You know, I'd like to see a movie with Anthony Hopkins and John Malcovich, only I'd like to see them with synthetic skin and creepy dead eyes?" The production design, the simulated flames--this looks like a video game at best, the work of technicians, not artists.
Compare that to this scene from Nightmare Before Christmas, with lengthy, elegant takes and fluid movement which excites because of its unreality--Jack's impossibly long limbs and spidery hands. This is recognizable human movement stylized, as a great choreographer might. Also, note the quiet melancholy of this scene--though Danny Elfman's melody apes Kurt Weill a little too closely, at least he's stealing from the best. Besides, this scene always made my mom cry:
This gorgeous sequence was created using one of the oldest techniques in film history, yet it feels absolutely vital and alive. There's no reason you couldn't do something similar in CGI, but you'd have to want to, you'd need the will to break from reality, from all the easy tricks and lazy shortcuts you know so well, and give us something new.
