From Reject to Role Model: How Tim Burton's 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' Shattered Gender Norms and Redefined Being Different in the Most Unexpected Way!

As a little kid, I had a reputation for being a tomboy. I liked monster movies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I only would wear skirts for special occasions. I was thus shunned by the girls for this ungirlish inclination; and shunned too by the boys due to my inevitably remaining a girl. 

This isn't to say I didn't also like the pretty princess stuff. But, for all Belle in Beauty and the Beast griped about not fitting in, she really didn't seem to have actual issues with being rejected or outcast by anyone -- the bookstore guy loved her so much he gave her free books and the most popular guy in town still wanted to marry her even though she couldn't stand him. I admired and idolized the princess characters, as they're so carefully crafted to make you want to do; but there was always something about their hopes and experiences that didn't really fit with my reality and worldview. They were always perfectly girly and perfectly liked by all "good" characters. (I think that Mulan, who didn't appear till some years later, was the first exception to this.) The princesses had "weird hobbies" which were innocuous things like Ariel's amateur anthropology and Belle's reading fairytale books -- stuff that most school age kids are actually encouraged to do.

Compare my goddamn Ninja Turtles, who have one human friend and mostly hide out in the sewers, doing their ninja thing and being named after Renaissance artists and making it all work out fairly well -- but always with a sense of danger just about their existing. They have to hide, and must wear disguises if it's necessary that they go out in public. Still, the Turtles are all about saving humanity from assorted evil forces, fighting for a greater good that will benefit them and the public who hates them so. They're heroes. Characters aimed at boys were usually heroes, fighting to save the world.

Then in 1993, my movie came. The movie that just got it in a way like nothing else I'd seen before. That film was... The Nightmare Before Christmas. 

You have Jack. He is the King of Halloween. Now, as a kid I always thought it was funny that stories were eternally about people wanting to be princes and princesses, because wouldn't it be better to be a king or a queen? Jack's an actual KING -- that's already a step up from the usual. 

Within the world Jack inhabits, he has zero issues with fitting in. In fact, he's adored by his crowd. But he's finding himself in an artistic slump. What brings him out of it, is the seemingly contrary world of Christmasland, with all its cuteness and innocence and wholesomeness. This gives him many wonderful new ideas; but, apparently comprehending that these notions are not applicable to Halloween, his plan becomes to have the people of Halloween shift gears and take over Christmas for the year. Soon the town is in production of a Christmastime, based on Jack's limited understanding of it, as further reinterpreted by all the Halloween townsfolk. Jack arranges for some trick or treaters to acquire Santa Claus (it's unclear whether Jack actually asks them to kidnap "Sandy Claws" but that's plainly how his top secret request gets interpreted) so that he can have proper control of the holiday. Jack is certain that his version of Christmas will be an improvement over the usual, and his improvements amount to making it more scary. See -- cute, innocent and wholesome isn't what Jack is about, even if he is able to enjoy those traits in others. He didn't become the brilliant leader of Halloween by being soft and snuggly. Despite his general friendliness, he is scary as crap, and it comes to him "without ever even trying." 

Consequently his version of Christmas plays out as an absolute disaster. The humans he wants to entertain with his "improved" holiday neither enjoy nor appreciate his innovations. Moreover, the trick or treaters who were supposed to be hosting Santa Claus instead turned him over to the evil bogeyman, Oogie Boogie. Santa winds up being tortured and is nearly murdered, when Jack returns at the last possible moment to save him. Once Oogie Boogie is dealt with, Jack apologizes to Santa and turns Christmas back over to him. Santa is naturally not happy about how things have transpired, but he appears to understand Jack's lack of intended malice. The film ends with Santa granting Halloweentown a Christmas gift of a never-before-seen snowfall (because the filmmakers were from Los Angeles and didn't realize it's common to see snow at Halloween, in places where snow happens.)

Folks back in '93 didn't know what to make of this movie. The title "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas" seems to have been a late addition designed to give the film more credibility by associating it with the already famous director (who did not direct the film.) I admit that there are flaws in its storytelling, and probably, if the movie were being made today, they'd add a heroic element of selflessness to Jack's activity (like maybe change it so that everyone, not just Jack, is bored and uninspired with Halloween, and unless Jack gets everyone excited and enthused about something, the whole town will be destroyed. Everything nowadays has to be about saving the world/race/town, you see.) Yet, that omission was part of what made this a great story, different, and something that wasn't being depicted in other kid's movies. Jack wasn't acting out of an aspiration to be a great leader or to better the world. He was just a lone artist. He just needed to create new stuff, and Christmas was his muse. His whole life was simply going to be all about Christmas for the next three or four months till that project was complete, and he didn't really even mind if he had to die to get it done, it was happening.

Moreover, this was presented as okay. A film like Beauty and the Beast was all about how Beast was a weirdo loser who needed to obliterate everything about himself to be worthy of love from the virtually perfect Belle. Meanwhile, in Nightmare, the virtually perfect Santa Claus is able to accept Jack as he is, even if there's mutual understanding that maybe Christmas isn't the right thing for Jack to be involved with henceforth. In fact, the only change Jack undergoes at all is that by the end of the film, he's recognized that his stalker, Sally, might be a good romantic companion (due to Santa's stated approval of her actions.)

Ah, Sally. Another first of the kind. See, kid's cartoons back then didn't let girl characters be spooky or weird. They were always like April O'Neil on Ninja Turtles -- a friend of the mutants, but herself a normal and indeed conventionally attractive female. Even when they adapted Beetlejuice into a kid's cartoon, Lydia wasn't depicted as gooble-gobble one of the freaks: she was written basically indistinguishable from Belle in Beauty and the Beast -- folks around her "didn't understand" her odd ways, but she was never shown to seriously suffer for them. Meantime, she treated Beetlejuice like a pet, summoning him whenever she wanted, and showing him the right way to behave. Apart from an occasional (evil) female vampire character, girls in monster-oriented kid's stories were perpetually Fay Wray level: pretty, normal girls who were simply "understanding" of monsters. Sally, on the other hand, was legitimately one of the monsters, even if her temperament was a little softer than most -- but she was still happy to casually poison her creator with gross animals so that she could run off to stare at Jack, and she was shown to have special monster powers in use of her detachable limbs. Some early sketches for the film suggest she was originally conceived on more of a Bride of Frankenstein model, but according to rumors, Tim Burton had her redesigned to resemble his then-girlfriend, Lisa Marie. 

 

When I did my Konmari ritual, I got rid of most of my old Nightmare merch, since it really all sat in a box and it was never looked at anymore. I kept only my Jack Skellington choker, my complete set of the trading cards, and my Mayor and Sally dolls from the original toy collection. When the film came out, I got all the first-generation Nightmare merch that I could get my hands on (and let me tell you, there wasn't much.) Sally was rarely shown back then -- apparently, everyone just knew girls didn't like monsters and boys don't like girl stuff -- consequently, Sally's existence as a character was downplayed. Judging by the old merch, the marketing department seemed to think of the film as primarily a Halloween movie, and there was instead a lot of emphasis on the trick or treaters Lock, Shock and Barrel in the toys that were released. It was only after the film had achieved cult status that Sally began to feature more strongly in the merch -- as it became apparent that there were girls out there who identified with or at least admired the spooky female.

Yet I remember when the film was new, it was hard to find anyone else who was really into it. It was strange to me how, contrary to the way most films worked, over time there started to be more and more merch, and more and more fans. Eventually even Disney, who had disowned the film and instead released it under their Touchstone label, embraced the picture and actually reconfigured their beloved Disneyland Haunted House ride into a Nightmare Before Christmas ride for half the year. 

Something else I discovered via Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas was the eponymous Tim Burton himself. I was 11 when the movie came out and didn't know too much about famous directors at that point. When I went looking into this Tim Burton character, I discovered he'd been behind a lot of my favorite movies up to that time. When I got the making-of book, I learned he was an ex-Disney animator (who'd been very unhappy at the job) who had gone on to direct movies, including Batman which was about as big a deal as a movie got in those days. Like Jack Skellington, Tim Burton had effortlessly -- indeed practically by accident -- been chosen out of college to be a Disney animator. At the studio, he tried and tried to make material that the company would like, but they continually put it down as quite too horrifying. They finally fired him (in a "you go your way and we'll go our way" fashion not unlike Jack and Santa) after he made a short horror-comedy film about a zombie bull terrier called Frankenweenie... which, ironically, Disney ended up remaking as a full length feature, many years later, after Burton's genius and commercial viability had been thoroughly tried and proved. The Nightmare Before Christmas had originated as a poem he wrote while he still worked at Disney; and due to the contract at the time, anything he devised while working for Disney was forever owned by Disney. Thus he had to return to them to get his movie made; but by which time his success with Batman gave him the clout needed to see the project carried out, even if Disney was still weirded out by it, and even if he passed the directing duties over to fellow animator Henry Selick. The world was still a bit unready for Nightmare back in '93, but, it struck a chord with certain people; and its cult following helped it grow into something that you can now buy underwear about, which is probably the modern mark that a property has made it. The freaks of the world saw this representation of the impossible struggle to not be a freak when that's your natural way of being; and for once, it was depicted as alright to be that way.