Jack Skellington peekaboos from the inside of a handbag.
Snakes pop out of a woven leather bucket bag.
In the more than three decades since the film was released, Jack Skellington and The Nightmare Before Christmas have become synonymous with a certain brand of Halloween-like spookiness, a soft spot for Christmas and the holidays, and a wondrous gothic style and sensibility. The film originated from a poem Burton wrote in 1982 while working as an animator at Walt Disney Productions. “It was something that came not so much from a thought, but was just more slightly from the subconscious,” Burton says in a documentary short accompanying the Loewe collection.
But just as film and animation have changed over the years, the meaning of the film and its legacy have too. The Nightmare Before Christmas has become arguably one of the most renowned stop-motion-animation films. The painstaking process of making the film required the creation of 227 puppets and the shooting of 109,440 frames to bring the story to life. “I love [stop motion] because it’s all handmade,” Burton says. “When you see the puppets and the sets, you wish everybody could experience the tactile nature of what goes into making a stop-motion film, or any film.”
In the age of artificial intelligence, the movie has become a symbol of human craft and ingenuity. “The more it keeps going that way,” Burton says of the proliferation of AI, “the more I appreciate [the human] side of it. I think it’s something that’s very important to keep in the world, the tactile, not being on a screen all the time and doing all that sort of thing. To me, [humanity] is very important to life and art and anything, really.”
