National Film Vault

FILM NOTES

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas was released by Touchstone Pictures in October 1993, produced through Burton's vision and directed by Henry Selick. The film marked a landmark achievement in stop-motion animation, bringing a fully realized fantasy world to theatrical audiences and establishing itself as a defining work of the decade. Its handcrafted aesthetic, built frame by painstaking frame, gave the medium a new level of cinematic ambition.

This cell, titled Sally, captures the ragdoll character across three consecutive frames from what appears to be an exterior Halloween Town setting. The inverted orientation of the strip is a natural artifact of 35mm presentation. The subtle variations between frames offer a rare glimpse into the incremental craft of stop-motion, preserving Sally mid-movement in a quiet, atmospheric moment.