National Film Vault

FILM NOTES

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas was released by Touchstone Pictures in October 1993, directed by Henry Selick and produced through Burton's creative vision. The film represented a landmark achievement in stop-motion animation, blending gothic sensibility with musical storytelling in a way that found immediate cult status and enduring mainstream appeal across multiple generations of viewers.

This cell, titled Captured Santa Claus, preserves three frames from Oogie Boogie's lair sequence, one of the film's most visually striking passages. Santa Claus appears as a blue figure against the darkened, light-scattered environment of the lair, while Oogie Boogie's distinctive green clawed hand looms overhead in each frame, conveying the menace of the scene with remarkable compositional consistency across the strip.