Great Character: Jack Skellington (“The Nightmare Before Christmas”)
The Great Character theme for the month: Christmas characters. Today: Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), screenplay by Caroline Thompson, adaptation by Michael McDowell, story and characters by Tim Burton. Here is Jason Cuthbert’s weekly Great Character post:
Leave it up to the wonderfully weird imagination of Tim Burton to mastermind a Christmas movie with a slinky trick-or-treating skeleton as a protagonist. Updating the handmade stop-motion animation technique used in the classic Christmas TV specials of the 1960s, Tim Burton’s story of Jack Skellington (voiced by Chris Sarandon), the Halloween Town pumpkin king who grows bored to the bone with his creepy holiday’s repetitive rituals and becomes a converted Christmas advocate. With a screenplay executed by Michael McDowell (Beetlejuice) and Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands) and direction provided by Henry Selick (Coraline), Tim Burton lures another quirky character out of the shadows to join the Gothic collective of Burton’s Batman, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd, Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie.
The Nightmare Before Christmas from IMDB:
Jack Skellington, king of Halloween Town, discovers Christmas Town, but doesn’t quite understand the concept.
Jack Skellington has his skull full of hero worship and continual compliments, but has become underwhelmed with the ease at which he can generate such praise from delivering an annual Halloween celebration worth celebrating. He has had his fair share of jack ‘o lanterns, witches and ghouls and is ready for a holiday from this holiday.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv1HX80u5x4
Skellington also has a female admirer, a mad scientist-made “franken-female” named Sally that wishes to emerge from the sidelines of his celebrity and into the inner sanctum of his attention span. Unfortunately for her, Jack has a serious case of tunnel vision, with his sights set only on finding a large ocean to accommodate his big-fish-in-a-small-pond ambitions. Jack’s journey into the welcomed unknown starts in a forest with holiday trees representing the village entrances for not just Halloween Town, but also the populations that revolve around Valentines Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Thanksgiving, and his biggest curiosity instigator — Christmas Town.
JACK SKELLINGTON: There’s children throwing snowballs / instead of throwing heads / they’re busy building toys / and absolutely no one’s dead!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuWD-mSUtrU
Jack Skellington’s wandering desires for a much more interesting and open-ended life is a very relatable concern — at any age range. Children wish they could leave their safe haven bedroom and hang out late like their teenage siblings. Teenagers crave the social and financial freedoms of an adult. Adults daydream of dropping their suffocating responsibilities and devolving into a kid again, and our elders would have preferred that their physical limitations hadn’t crept up on them so quickly. Jack is a jovial, well-meaning tour guide through these passionate protests against midlife crises, golden age gripes, adolescent angst and childhood inquisitiveness.
JACK SKELLINGTON: You know, I think this Christmas thing / Is not as tricky as it seems, / And why should they have all the fun? / It should belong to anyone!
Jack, like any super interesting character, is sympathetic yet fairly flawed. Sure, it is admirable to see him so driven to diversify his seemingly deprived Halloween Town with some foreign mistletoe kisses and Christmas cheer. But highjacking a holiday and ordering a kidnapping of Santa Claus, or if you let Skellington tell it: “Sandy Claws,” makes his good deeds messy and sketchy.
JACK SKELLINGTON: Just because I cannot see it, doesn’t mean I can’t believe it!
Force-feeding the good ghosts and goblins of Halloween Town with the abortion of pumpkin orange and witch hat black and adopting Santa suit red and Christmas tree green also brings out another intriguing gray area in Jack Skellington, he loves his fellow citizens, but wishes they would all change. He soon finds, with the help of his eventual better half Sally, that maybe Halloween Town didn’t need something new in their lives as much as he did.
For his visionary dreams of grandeur, his gregarious spirit, motivational energy and his need to not just find something new to celebrate — but someone new to celebrate — Jack Skellington is a GREAT CHARACTER in the Christmas motion picture tradition.
One of my favorite Christmas movies and a wonderful variation on the Hero’s Journey. Jack is a Protagonist in Disunity: An honored leader who has grown weary of the norm, yearning for something different. In a way, he is a direct opposite of Woody from Toy Story, another family story, the cowboy figure entirely happy with his lot as the leader of his ‘gang’. In his story, he is a Reluctant Hero, the Call To Adventure arriving in the unwanted form of Buzz Lighthyear. For Jack, he is a Willing Hero, leaping into the New World involving other holidays most notably Christmas.
Re Nightmare, special note must be made about the music which is superb owing to the creative work of Danny Elfman who also provided Jack Skellington’s singing voice.
Thank you, Jason, for this post and the entire month-long series featuring Christmas characters. What’s your favorite bit from the movie? Please join us in comments to discuss The Nightmare Before Christmas.
You may follow Jason on Twitter: @A2Jason.
UPDATE: Here’s a timely twee: 21 things you didn’t know about The Nightmare Before Christmas.
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