However, I think that a lot of the members of the massive Nightmare Before Christmas cult are mostly enthralled by the movie's images, and that is something to which I can relate. It's a friggin' great-looking movie, with delightful character designs brought to life with marvelously organic stop-motion animation. While I tend to zone out half-way through the movie (which I rewatch more than I would if I didn't have a kid), it's impossible to be a total Nightmare Scrooge because of its style, visuals, and technique.
While Emily Zemler's new book Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas: Beyond Halloween Town obviously can't convey the technique, it abounds with style and visuals and should scratch the itch for anyone like me who enjoys taking in the look of the film but doesn't really need to spend the full eighty minutes with it.
For the many who do need that, this book will be even more appealing as it relates the tale of how the phenomenon started as a series of Burton's poems before Caroline Thompson developed them into a script and Danny Elfman developed it into a musical and the finished product developed a cult which then developed into the holiday-mega-merchandizing bonanza it is today.
Because there are only 150 pages of content in this book, and text isn't its raison dêtre, I'd hesitate to call Zemler's book the definitive story of the making of Nightmare Before Christmas, but with its captivating images of concept art, behind the scenes puppetry, fan contributions, and merch that do, in their own way, tell the real story behind this film's deathless popularity, one could reasonably argue that Beyond Halloween Town is the definitive Nightmare book after all.
