disney

Cars (2006)

(DISCLAIMER: This blog is not for profit. All images and footage used below are property of their respective companies unless stated otherwise. I do not claim ownership of this material. New to the blog? Start at the start with Snow White.)

“Sigh.”

“You seem depressed Mouse. What is troubling you?”

“Doctor? Do you ever get…urges?”

“Ah. Well, at last we are coming to the heart of the matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your inability to come to terms with your sexuality is the root cause of all your psychoses. This is great progress. Tell me about the fish.”

“What? No, no. It’s not that.”

“Well, back to square ein.”

“For the last few weeks I’ve been having these insane urges to review Cars. But I hate that movie. I hate it so much.”

“And how does this make you feel?”

“I don’t know. Guilty, maybe?”

“Why guilty?”

“Because deep down I know there are movies that are much worse, movies that I even enjoy. But I hate this movie more than all of them and maybe it’s just not as bad as I remember.”

“And why do you think that?”

“Well, because it’s Pixar! I mean, it can’t be that bad, right?”

“Mouse, our course is clear. Your subconscious is telling you to review this movie with an open mind. Come. Let us begin. I shall be with you every step of the way.”

“Siiiiiiiiiigh.”

What am I doing? The first Pixar movie I review on this blog and it’s Cars. That’s like finally deciding to see what all the fuss is about this James Bond guy and watching Die Another Day. A question I get asked a lot on this blog is “Why don’t you review the Pixar movies?” and the simple answer is they’re just too good. The canon Disney movies have a nice mix of classics, forgotten gems and duds to keep things interesting. But Pixar’s record of quality is just so high that I honestly think I’d struggle to keep the reviews varied and interesting. Except for Cars. I’ve always hated Cars. I’m always LOATHED Cars. But that’s just based on one viewing of it years ago and I’d like to think I’ve matured a lot as a connoisseur of animation since those days. Maybe I was wrong? Maybe I judged it too harshly as so many of you in the comments keep telling me?

Maybe hell has frozen over? Maybe pigs can soar, soar like the mighty eagle?

Alright, so a little background. Cars was released in 2006, after The Incredibles and before Ratatouille. It was directed by John Lasseter himself and Joe Ranft, who died before the movie was released in a car accident, ironically enough.

“That’s not what “irony”means!”

Oh Nit. “Irony” doesn’t actually mean anything, it’s just a word people say.

A version of this story was knocking around Pixar as early as the completion of A Bug’s Life in 1998, and it was originally about an electric car in a world of gas guzzlers. As time went on it got postponed and reworked before finally getting released as Cars eight years later. And if that sounds like a long development time, remember that Disney is still releasing movies based on ideas they were toying with in the frickin’ forties.

Coming Summer 2034.

Because Cars merchandise basically conjures money from the ether for Disney/Pixar, it’s viewed by some fans as a sell-out movie, a vulgar cashgrab. That’s…probably unfair. From what I’ve read, for Lasseter Cars was a genuine labour of love, combining his two greatest passions, cars and animation. Well, as we’ve already established here on Unshaved Mouse, nothing works better than taking two things you love and merging them together in an ungodly fusion to appall both God and man.

Pictured: Cars.

Let’s take a look at the movie.

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Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #45: Home on the Range

“I now call this meeting of the United Foes of the Unshaved Mouse to order. Roll call! Comrade Crow!”

“Here.”

“Charlie McCarthy.”

“Here.”

“The Unscrupulous Mouse.”

“Here.”

“Taran_Wanderer_2”

“Here.”

“Fans of Beauty and the Beast“

“HERE!”

“Fans of Dinosaur.”

“….here.”

“Chairman Emeritus His Vileness the Horned King.”

I abide eternally.

“And the Avian Avatar of Avarice….THE PENGUIN!”

“Waugh! Waugh! Waugh! Excellent gentlemen! Excellent!”

Gentlemen. Ladies. Assorted vermin. You know why I have summoned you all here.

“I gotta question, Horny. Why are we holding meetings when the Mouse is still breathing? Why don’t we just take him out now?”

“Silence you over-varnished fool! Don’t you understand that an enemy like Batman can’t be defeated by mere brute strength? We have to…I think I might be in the wrong meeting.”

“Yeah. I think you’re across the hall.”

“Forgive me gentlemen.”

McCarthy. I would advise you to hold your tongue. Or I shall hold it for you.

“C’mon! Lets kill the Mouse!”

Fool. We’re not going to kill the Unshaved Mouse.

“We’re not?”

“Sorry, I think I might be in the wrong meeting too…”

No. We are not going to kill him. After all, there are things so much worse than death. I have devised a fate so heinous for the Unshaved Mouse that it can scarcely be believed. But it requires finesse, and patience.

“What is the plan, tovarich?”

First I will implant a hypnotic suggestion in the Mouse’s subconscious. Disney’s manipulations of him have left him uniquely suceptible to this. I intend to strike when he is at his weakest. His most vulnerable. His most…despairing.

First I will implant a hypnotic suggestion in the Mouse’s subconscious. Disney’s manipulations of him have left him uniquely susceptible to this. I intend to strike when he is at his weakest. His most vulnerable. His most…despairing.

***

AAAAAAARRRRHHHH…

YAAAAAAAAAARGGH…

BLEEEEEEECHHHHHHHH…

Alright, you know what? Before I can even approach this one I have got to rant about the poster. The goddamn poster! That’s how much suck we have to get through here.

“Bust a Moo?”

BUST A MOO?!!!!

WHAT THE FLAGELLATING FINICKY FLIPPING FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN!!???

FIND ME WHO CAME UP WITH THAT! I’M NOT EVEN KIDDING! FIND ME WHO WROTE THAT TAGLINE SO THAT I CAN PSYCHICALLY KILL THEM WITH PURE HATRED! DO IT NOW!

“Mouse. Calm down. Your friends are worried about you.”

“We’re worried. Yes.”

Sorry. You’re right. I’m sorry but…oh God that poster. That poster pretty much encapsulates the whole problem with this movie. Just this weird, desperate attempt to be hip and funny that fails so badly you’re not even sure if that’s what they were going for. It’s one thing to come last in a race. It’s another to come last because you were pushing a bobsled on the track. One just means you were bad. The other is being so inept it’s hard for an outside observer to be sure that you were even trying to win. Like all the real turkeys in the Disney canon, details on Home on the Range’s origins are hard to come by. Wikipedia, TV Tropes and IMDb are pretty light on facts and presumably only God and Michael Eisner know where the bodies are buried. I do know that Home on the Range started pre-production all the way back in 1995, that it was once going to be called Sweating Bullets and that the premise was at one point that a young calf named Bullets taking on a gang of ghost cattle rustlers called The Willies. Yeah, so this thing was always going to suck, basically. There is no universe where this movie turned out well.

How bad is it?

Come. Let us gaze upon the carnage…

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Coraline (2009)

“Tell me vat happened, Mouse. In your own vords.”

“Paper Alchemist…it was her fault! She told me to watch it…I thought she was my friend. Those eyes. Button eyes…”

"I don't understand. You had made such fine progress. Ven last ve spoke you had overcome your fear of Pinocchio and were reviewing the entire Disney canon. You seemed in good mental health. Vat triggered zis relapse?"

“I don’t understand. You had made such fine progress. Ven last ve spoke you had overcome your fear of Pinocchio and were reviewing ze entire Disney canon. You seemed in good mental health. Vat brough on zis relapse?”

“Pinocchio? That’s right. I used to be afraid of that movie. God, I was a fool.”

HELLO!

“Hey.”

“Then tell me, Mouse. What triggered zis episode?”

“I remember it like it was yesterday. When in fact, it was the day before yesterday. I’d finally decided to start reviewing non-Disney movies regularly. Walt tried to warn me against it…”

“You’re a fool Mouse! Everytime you review a non-Disney movie you invite terrible doom!”

“But I thought it’d be fine! After all, I reviewed Nightmare Before Christmas at Halloween and nothing bad happened!”

“Ja…of course.”

“You don’t know that!”

"I am sorry, zis is a private session. I will have to ask you to leave."

“I am sorry, zis is a private session. I vill have to ask you to leave.”

“And who the stuttering fuck might you be?”

"I am Herr Doktor Ernst Fiedelman. I am ze Mouse's psychoanalysist."

“I am Herr Doktor Ernst Fiedelman. I am ze Mouse’s psychoanalyst.”

“Psychoanalyses? Mouse why are you wasting your time with this flim flam? Some good old fashioned voodoo is all you need, where’s my cauldron?”

“Out.”

“I think I am beginning to understand. You reviewed a movie horrific enough to undo years of intensive psychoanalysis. Something by Adam Sandler I am guessing, ja?”

“Nein. Coraline.”

“Mein Gott! Mouse, ve have no choice. You must face your fear, and talk me through the review. Only then can we undo the psychological damage.”

“Really? Because that sounds like it would make things so much worse.”

“Ve’re talking fifty fifty either vay. Now begin!”

Well. Okay. Here we. go. Coraline.

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Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #44: Brother Bear

Disney is proud of Atlantis. It didn’t make a lot of money, it wasn’t a huge critical success, but nonetheless they are damned proud of that movie. How do I know? Look at the DVD release. There are literally hours of behind the scenes material, concept art, excised scenes and a full visual commentary by the directors. All this is essentially the studio saying “Looking how much hard work and effort and craft went into making this film.”

The Brother Bear DVD has a commentary by two Canadian moose. Make of that what you will.

Why did no one warn me? Seriously? Why did none of you have the goddamned decency to let me know what was in store? Oh sure, you said it was bad. But there is a difference between saying “You know, trains can be dangerous if they hit you” and screaming “GET OFF THE TRACKS YOU IDIOT!!”. Hell, why didn’t Disney warn me? How could they just release this on an unsuspecting public? Okay fine, I don’t expect them to flat out say “Our movie is cinema’s answer to the Khmer Rouge” but they could at least have hinted in their marketing that some serious shit was coming our way.

Oh. My apologies.

Bad? Oh hell yes.

Worse than Dinosaur?

I…I…ohhhhh that is hard to answer. Do you take the flaming mace to the nutsack or the being forcibly fed live moray eels? Dinosaur is horribly deriviative, ugly and deathly dull. Brother Bear, at least, is only one of those (the last one). It’s not a particularly bad looking film, certainly not jaw-dropping but not an assualt on the eyes either. And I certainly would never call this movie deriviative. Dinosaur’s plot is so rote you pretty much know how it’s going to play out within five minutes. Brother Bear though? Credit where it’s due, I guess, I would not have predicated the story choices this movie makes. It certainly tries to break the mold and try something different. But…”different” is not always “good”.

Well, that’s “different”.

I honestly have never watched any Disney movie so slack jawed with utter disbelief at what I was watching. Never have I stared at the screen, silently mouthing the words “No. NO! No. No…No.”

I wanted to give you some background on this movie, what they were thinking, who thought it, what punishment was eventually meted out to them but there is nothing really. Nothing on the internet, nothing on the DVD barring the moose commentary. And no, I didn’t listen to it. I don’t owe you that. I don’t owe anyone that.

Sigh. Let’s just do this.

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Video Reviews #6 & #7: Saludos Amigos and Three Caballeros

Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #43: Treasure Planet

***

Occasionally, before beginning a review, I will don a simple disguise and mingle with the common folk of the Disney fandom. “Tell me good sirrah,” I might enquire of some good-hearted peasant in a small, provincial internet forum “What do the people think of Lilo and Stitch?”.

“Why sir, it is rightly lauded as a most wondrous film and much beloved.”

“And the Unshaved Mouse? I have heard that he is a reviewer of passable skill?”

“Passable skill? By thunder sir, he is a very God amongst the reviewing class, and most sorely do I wish he were here, that I might shake his hand.”

“Mayhap he is closer than you think, good pleb” I would say with a benevolent smile. I would then toss him a Bitcoin to see the light of thanks in his eyes, and be on my way.

My point is, I try to take the pulse of where we as a fandom are on a particular film and what I found with Treasure Planet made me a little worried. A cursory glance at the internet shows that this thing has a healthier fanbase than many other movies in the canon. Lots of fanart and fanfiction, plenty of people willing to fly the “Lost Classic” banner, some of the most soul scarring motherfucking Jim/Silver porn you have ever seen in your life that I can now never unsee for as long as I live…

But on the flip side…

Yeah, so there is a lot of hate for this thing out there. Robert Louis Stevenson purists, animation nerds who blame it for the death of traditional Disney animation, people who just flat out hate it as a movie, Somalis who were suckered into a life of piracy by the unrealistic portrayal in the movie…

These young men were promised robots.

This movie has made more enemies than Boba Fett. And this puts me in a tough position because when it comes to Treasure Planet I fall into the controversial camp of: ”Meh. ‘Sfine.”

Treasure Planet was actually originally pitched by Ron Clements and Jon Musker all the way back in 1985 but it was passed over in favour of Little Mermaid which…yeah, probably the right call. I was surprised to learn that this was a Clements and Musker film because it feels a lot more like something by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, particularly Atlantis. Clements and Musker were actually happy for the delay because by the time they got a chance to make it the technology had caught up with their vision for the film. And I’ve got to say this up front; this film is gorgeous. In fact, almost all the Lost Era movies are. The quality of the movies may have gone down after the renaissance, sure, but if anything the animation just kept getting better and better. Let’s take a look.

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Disney Reviews #42: Lilo and Stitch

Sometime before production had started on Mulan, Michael Eisner took a load of the Disney animators out to his mother’s apple orchard so that they could get inspiration from the gorgeous autumnal colours and also because there were a load of apples that needed picking , chop, chop. As the pasty, pencil armed creatures hoisted bushels and sweated against the magnificent backdrop of a September sunset, Michael Eisner’s thoughts turned to Dumbo, another endeavour that would not have been possible without cheap, non-union labour. Why was it that Disney couldn’t make movies like Dumbo anymore?, Eisner mused later that night, enjoying a frothy mug of Mama Eisner’s finest apple cider as the sweet melody of the animators singing their spirituals in the nearby camp wafted through the night air. Dumbo, you’ll recall, was pretty much the only Disney animation of the forties to turn a profit, not because it did that much better at the box-office than the other films but because it had been so cheap to make. The next day, the surviving animators were rounded up and taken back to Burbank and the basic idea for Lilo and Stitch had been planted; to create a successful animated film that did not cost the GNP of a small European nation to make. Lilo and Stich had a budget of $80 Million, which only sounds like a lot because we are poor and clad in filthy rags. For a feature length animated film it’s peanuts. But fortunately, some cartoons work for peanuts.

Eddie Valiant, however, does not.

Actually, the relatively small budget was the gift that kept on giving for this movie. The fact that directors Chris Sanders and Dean deBlois weren’t gambling with a huge chunk of Disney’s money meant that they could work without the execs breathing down their necks like a pack of asthmatic vampire bats. In fact, management was remarkably hands off on this one, which is why it looks, sounds and feels like nothing else in the canon. This movie is shaped visually by Chris Sanders own unique artistic style, and if you came to this movie cold you probably wouldn’t even know it was a Disney movie. But is that a good thing?

Let’s take a look.

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Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #41: Atlantis: The Lost Empire

***

So you may have noticed that I’ve been doing a little housekeeping around here.

Anything to avoid doing a little housekeeping around here.

Since we’re now pushing fifty reviews I’ve finally organised the reviews by era and decade so you can more easily browse them. Longtime readers of the blog will know that I’ve got my own idiosyncratic way of organising the canon Disney movies; The Tar and Sugar Movies of the late thirties and early forties, the Never Heard of ‘Ems of the war years, the fifties Restoration, the sixties and seventies Scratchy Era, the Mourning Era of the eighties and the Renaissance of the nineties. I then had to come up with a name for this weird post-millenial chunk of movies between Fantasia 2000 and The Princess and the Frog and this had me stumped for a good while. I hear “The Dark Age” trotted out a lot as a description for this era but that just doesn’t sit well with me for two reasons; firstly I try to use a name that suits the overall style and tone of the movies and the movies of this period are not particularly “dark”. Then of course, “The Dark Age” implies that all these films are somehow inferior and you can tell me that The Emperor’s New Groove and Lilo and Stitch are bad movies or you can keep your limbs intact but you cannot do both. Finally, I settled on “The Lost Era” because this era, like the Mourning Era, was an experimental time where Disney was trying to answer the question “What kind of movies do we make?” The most sustained periods of success in Disney’s history have always been times when the company found a formula that worked. When they knew what they were about. In the fifties, it was fairytales and adaptations of classic children’s literature. In the sixties, it was jazzy Sherman Brothers musicals, in the nineties it was all about Broadway. The origins of Atlantis: The Lost Empire began in a Mexican restaurant when directors Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise and producer Don Hahn sat down to a big bowl of nachos and tried to figure out the future of Disney. These three men were the creative heads behind my personal favorite Disney movie, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and this meeting was born largely out of a desire to keep the band together, so to speak. Trousdale, Wise and Hahn realised that they had put together an absolutely phenomenal team for Hunchback and were anxious not to see this incredibly talented group of people separated and put on other projects. The solution was obvious: Make another movie. But what kind of movie? It was clear by now that the Broadway Disney musical had been done. And done again. And then, why not, done a couple more times. And while those movies had been hugely (HUGELY) successful, it was clear that enough was enough. When you’ve got a formula that’s familiar enough for this kind of parody to work…

…it’s time to try something new. This was the paradox Disney faced in the early 21st century. They knew what worked, but they couldn’t do it anymore. For a while, Tarzan had seemed to offer a way forward, a pseudo-musical with all the songs sung by a big name musical talent instead of the characters. But then that had come a rather massive cropper with the Kingdom of the Sun/Emperor’s New Groove debacle. Yeah, yeah, I know. You love the movie, I love the movie. That’s because it didn’t cost us $100 Million. More importantly perhaps, Trousdale, Wise and Hahn did not want to make another animated musical. As the nacho cheese flowed like wine, the three men began talking about the movies they had loved growing up, and specifically, the Disney movies they had loved growing up. Now, hold onto your hats people because I am about to blow your freaking minds. Did you know that Disney also made live action, non-animated, human-acted with actual human beings movies?

I warned you.

My paw to God, it’s true. In fact, my good buddy Animation Commendation even has a blog devoted to Disney’s live action efforts which I’ve been meaning to link to for ever. You should check it out. The germ for the idea that would become Atlantis began with a desire to do an animated version of the old Disney live action adventure movies. You know, Davy Crockett, Treasure Island and by far it’s most obvious influence, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Atlantis represented a huge, daring creative gamble for Disney, an attempt to break out of the admittedly lucrative formula that had begun to stifle the studio creatively. This was going to be something new. There would be no funny animal sidekicks. The movie’s unofficial motto during production was “less singing, more explosions”. Comic book creator Mike Mignola was brought in to give the movie a new distinctive visual look. This thing would have a PG rating by God!

I’m frightened.

One thing that really comes across watching this movie and the bonus material that comes with it is just how much everybody cared about this film. Seriously, you can tell, they worked their asses off on this. Did it pay off?

Well…read the review! You think I’m just going to tell you up front?

Nerve of some people…

Let’s take a look at the movie.

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Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #40: The Emperor’s New Groove

***

So let me tell you a little story about the worst movie Disney never made. It was called Kingdom of the Sun, an epic retelling of the story of the Prince and the Pauper set in the Incan Empire. Roger Allers, director of the Lion King was at the helm, Owen Wilson was cast as the Pauper, David Spade was the Prince, Eartha Kitt was playing the villainous sorceress Yzma who was to be animated by the legendary Andreas Deja. Oh, and the score was to be provided by legendary rocker Sting. Sounds pretty awesome, right? So what happened? Well, the movie making business is a huge, complex and labyrinthine affair and the reasons why certain movies fail and others succeed is never clear cut but if I had to guess I’d have to say it was because it sucked balls. Test audiences hated the movie, which was a problem because half the damn thing was already completed. So Mark Dindal, director of Cats Don’t Dance, was brought in to make the movie a bit more light hearted and audience friendly. Dindal and Allers pretty soon found themselves at odds to the point where each director was essentially making a different movie. The Disney execs had been willing to give Allers a lot of leeway because…y’know…fucking Lion King…but it was becoming increasingly apparent that Kingdom of the Sun wasn’t going to make it’s 2000 release date. And this was a problem because Disney had signed merchandising deals with McDonald’s and Coke who probably had Michael Eisner’s daughter as collateral or something. Allers asked for a six month extension to get his shit together. And so Allers left and it fell to Dindal to pull off one of the most amazing salvage jobs in modern movie history. Out of the ashes of Kingdom of the Sun, came Emperor’s New Groove, which I have now rewatched and feel confident in saying is the single greatest comedy in the entire Disney canon. Funnier than Robin Hood and Jungle Book. It’s hilarious. In fact, it’s so funny that I’m pretty much totally screwed. There is nothing harder to review than a good comedy, especially if you are a quote unquote “comedic” reviewer. I mean, look, I think I can be pretty funny on a good day, but there is no way in hell that I can write a review that will make you laugh more than just watching this thing. But, as long we’re all agreed that this is an exercise in futility, I’m game if you are. Okay, so Dindal basically decided that there was no chance in hell they could do the kind of epic, Lion King-esque movie that Allers had planned in the time left, so they might as well just have fun. Gone was the Prince and the Pauper storyline. Yzma was now a wacky mad scientist. The Emperor, Kuzco, was now an entitled jerk. The tapes for Owen Wilson’s performance were taken and cast out into the wilderness to be feasted on by jackals with a taste for deadpan Texan delivery and John Goodman was brought in to replace him. Everything was now stripped down, small cast, simple plot, no big animated set pieces. Oh, and all but two of the songs Sting wrote were tossed out. Sting would later say: “At first, I was angry and perturbed. Then I wanted some vengeance.” Well, having had to listen to My Funny Friend and Me, I too want some vengeance, Sting.

And here it is.

Let’s take a look at the film.

***

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Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #666: The Nightmare Before Christmas

***

Hi everyone. So, unfortunately I’ve got some bad news. I know you were all looking forward to my review of Emperor’s New Groove but I’m afraid I just wasn’t able to get it done on time. Sorry. I’ve actually been going through a lot of personal problems recently that’ve been making it hard to write. You all know of course that I recently suffered a severe trauma.

Why God?

But reviewing Dinosaur was just the straw that broke the mouse’s back. I’m just…

I’m tired of this. I’ve reviewed over forty movies now and it’s just getting so hard to come up with new jokes every two weeks. It’s just the same routine over and over again.

And I! Mouse! The Un-shaved king…have grown so tired of the same old thing…

Oh, don’t say that meu amigo. You just need a little break.

Hmm…you seem vaguely familiar. I feel like I know you, but blocked out the memory for some reason. Weird.

I get that a lot. You know what you need? You need to review something a little different. Like this!

The Nightmare Before Christmas? Well, it is a great movie. And it is Halloween. But…no, I couldn’t. It’s not part of the canon!

You’ve reviewed plenty of movies that aren’t in the canon. You even reviewed An American Tail when you were in the Bluthverse.

That’s true…wait, how could you know that?

Let’s just say I’m well informed. Come on Mouse. Review the movie. You know you want to.

No, no. I can’t. All the reviews I do are in strict chronological order. Nightmare Before Christmas came out in 1993, I’m already into 2000.

And what a great decade that was! You’re right. I’ll leave you to review Brother Bear, Chicken Little, Home on the Range…

Okay! Okay! You’ve talked me into it. I mean, it’ll be fine. So I temporarily forsake my sacred oath to review all the canon Disney classics in order? What’s the worst that could happen?

What indeed?

Okay. So, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Little basic housekeeping out of the way first, this movie was in fact neither written nor directed by Tim Burton.

Yeah, NO idea why you might think that.

You’ll remember from the Fox and the Hound review that Tim Burton was an animator at Disney before leaving to become a big time Hollywood muck-a-muck. He came up with the concept for the film, based on a poem he himself wrote in 1982, and designed most the of the characters but when the time came to actually shoot the thing, Burton was too busy making Batman Returns and handed directing duties off to Henry Selick, and scriptwriting chores to Caroline Thompson and Michael McDowell. However, I don’t want to undersell Burton’s contribution as this is still probably the most “Tim Burtony” film ever made. That’s really down to the fealty with which Selick treated Burton’s designs and ideas. I mean sure, they put Burton’s name over the thing because he was the bigger draw, and that kind of sucks for Selick…but at the same time, it does very much feel like Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas. But of course, the clues are there that Burton didn’t actually direct it. Because Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter aren’t in it and Burton never does anything without Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. And I’m not just talking about movies, either. Burton doesn’t go to the bathroom without Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter (Depp pulls the fly down, Carter pulls it back up).

Nightmare has two big influences, the old Rankin/Bass stop-motion Christmas specials and even more so, the 1966 animated version of Dr Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Jack Skellington was envisioned by Burton as being a kind of anti-Grinch, a macabre character who adores Christmas instead of loathing it, but whereas the Grinch changes once he comes to understand Christmas, Jack never does and the movie implies that really that’s okay. Christmas is not for everyone.

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