I really didn't like "Nightmare Before Christmas," even though I really, really wanted to. The animation was great, the character design superb, but there was something definately missing...Danny Elfman's score and songs were leaden and creaky and repetitive, and the story didn't seem to know whether it was out to scare or out to charm, and so did neither.
When I heard that Tim Burton, Henry Selick and a lot of the people who did "Nightmare" were to set out and do one of my childhood favorite books, "James and the Giant Peach," I feared the worst. The wittily macabre elements would be tamed, the sweetness cranked up to toothache-inducing heights, and the story would be a mangled mess. Surprise! This turned out to be not the case, as "James" actually retains a lot of the quirky charm and black humor that made the book so good. Yes, James' parents do get killed by that other-dimensional carnivorous Rhino. Yes, Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge put James through a Dickensian hell, although we are robbed of the satisfying moment in the book when the runaway Giant Peach flattens them like pancakes. And a fight underwater with some nasty (and one Skellington-ian) Pirate skeletons has been added, plus one more legitimately scary bit which I cannot reveal for fear of Spoiler violation.
The movie really doesn't take off until the live-action James is magically transformed into the animated one, and when that happens, BOOM! The dimensional animation is smooth as silk, even better than "Nightmare" with some very realistic insect and invertibrate-derived movement. And each character has even more character development than even the book gave them. Centipede, thanks to Richard Dreyfuss, has a pugnacious, Bowery Boys inspired 'New York state of mind', if you know what I mean. Simon Callow's Grasshopper is an elegant, cultured British gentleman with a mean kick if provoked. But Susan Sarandon has got to give propers to June Foray with that voice she came up with for Miss Spider...I detected a little bit of Natasha Fatale leaking in around the edges.
But what really shines are the points where Our Heroes are in danger...the Mechanical Shark sequence was especially powerful, with its grinding gears and snapping jaws almost chewing the overgrown garden creepy-crawlers up into insect sushi. This sequence especially is one I might think would be too intense for really small kids, but then again, facing scary moments in cartoons seems to be a modern rite of passage for kids. Whether it's the more intense moments of "Snow White," the "Night On Bald Mountain," sequence in "Fantasia", or Harmon and Ising's 1936 MGM short "Bottles," (the last of which being my own personal Childhood Cartoon Scary Moment) it's a part of growing up. And I suspect that the Shark mech is going to be in a lot of kid's nightmares from now on.
The choice of Randy Newman for the score and the songs in this movie is a pretty good one, although he does go a little too much for the syrup in the initial ballad "My Name Is James" and the Barney-esque "We're Family." But most of the time he's right on. There is a very good feeling of being in-period...the whole movie seems to be set in the mid-1930s, and there is a strong Music Hall feel to his score and most of the songs. The best tune, "Eating The Peach," is so successful because Newman actually lays back and lets the late Dahl write the lyrics...they are taken verbatim from a poem in the book. I found myself singing along with it because the poem is such a vivid memory for me. Newman, if you are not aware, is the son of Lionel Newman, who is one of the greats as far as movie composers go, right up there with Bernard Herrman and George Gershwin. It might be genetic with him...Randy Newman's scores for "Toy Story" and "The Natural" rank among the best in recent memory.
Although this movie is more along the lines of the typical Disney formula, it is important to note that the darker tone and the fact that there are only four songs in the body of the movie mark this as another departure from tradition. "Nightmare Before Christmas" followed the Disney musical comedy formula more closely than this. Perhaps the success of this and "Toy Story" might go a long way towards preventing future travesties along the lines of giving Quasimodo three wacky gargoyle sidekicks in the upcoming "Hunchback Of Notre Dame" or making the hyenas in "Lion King" too cute and not menacing enough...the typical "wacky henchman to the evil villain" trip.
Take a bite out of this "Peach"...it's way better than Hot Frogs. Oh yeah, one last thing...a nice A.N.P. shout out to Sari Gennis, who was the Cel effects animation director on this movie. Good work, girlfriend! :-)
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Page last updated 1/15/1998
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