National Film Vault

FILM NOTES

The Nightmare Before Christmas arrived in October 1993 under the Touchstone Pictures banner, produced by Tim Burton and directed by Henry Selick. A landmark in stop-motion animation, the film blended gothic sensibility with musical storytelling in a way that had rarely been attempted at studio scale. Its handcrafted aesthetic, requiring years of painstaking frame-by-frame work, gave it a texture that set it apart from the era's computer-assisted productions and secured its place as a defining work of the decade.

This cell carries the confirmed title Timmy and presents three consecutive frames from the live-action real-world sequence, capturing the young boy in a warmly lit interior. The wooden paneling behind him and his upward gaze place this moment within the film's grounded, human-world framing. Holding three frames of Timmy in close succession offers a rare sense of motion and continuity, preserving a quiet corner of the picture that is easily overlooked against its more celebrated animated passages.