Re-released for the holiday season, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas hasn't aged a day since its initial launch in 1993. This stop-motion gem, a triumph of 3D animation, is more than just a Playskool rendering of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It's an elegant, melancholy fable teeming with macabre wit, sophisticated imagination and nimble musical numbers by the Gershwin of the weird, Danny Elfman (Beetlejuice).
The story's a wisp-Jack Skellington, the ghoulish cause célèbre of Halloweentown, hatches a scheme to annex the Christmas holiday, with mordantly disastrous results-but it allows director Henry Selick to craft eye candy as delicious as any on display in producer Burton's best films, including the equally lush, equally cheeky Sleepy Hollow. And Skellington's moonlit waltz with his paramour Sally represents the most romantic moment in animated history-a sugarplum in this Grand Guignol.
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