National Film Vault

FILM NOTES

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas was released by Touchstone Pictures in October 1993, produced through Burton's collaboration with director Henry Selick and Disney. The stop-motion animated feature arrived at a moment when the medium was largely overlooked by mainstream studios, and its success helped reestablish handcrafted animation as a viable cinematic form. Its visual language, rooted in German Expressionism and Burton's own gothic sensibility, set a lasting template for dark fantasy storytelling.

This cell, titled Lock, Shock and Barrel, captures the mischievous trio across three consecutive frames of the same shot, preserving a rare sustained moment of their on-screen dynamic. Barrel, Shock, and Lock appear together in a shared composition, offering collectors a cohesive sequence rather than an isolated image — a meaningful distinction for anyone drawn to the film's ensemble of Halloween Town characters.