Tim Burton Didn’t Really Make The Nightmare Before Christmas… So Why Does He Get the Credit?

There are some classics in the stop-motion claymation world, such as Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie, Coraline, James and the Giant Peach, and possibly the most famous, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. It might shock you to learn that only two of these films were made by the legendary filmmaker Tim Burton.

What?! The Nightmare Before Christmas wasn’t directed by Tim Burton?! Nope. He wrote the story (which screenwriter Caroline Thompson fleshed out), co-produced the feature film, and came up with the character designs for Jack Skellington, Sally and the rest of Halloween Town, but he was not the head of the team that really brought the movie to life. But then why is it called Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas?

Tim Burton Knows That The Nightmare Before Christmas Is Not His Film

In a 2012 interview with IGN, it was discovered that Disney chose to rename the Halloween movie because it was afraid its core audience would hate the film and not come to the viewing. To distance themselves, they added the well-known Tim Burton’s name to draw in a wider audience and attract his fans to the release.

Tim Burton shared on Burton on Burton that it turned into more of a brand-name thing, and it was something that he wasn’t sure about. Even though it is based on his poem of the same name, the Edward Scissorhands director is well aware that he didn’t make the stop-motion animation movie and, in fact, didn’t have time to “handle the painstakingly slow process of stop-motion” and actually passed the opportunity to do Nightmare onto Henry Selick, who brought the iconic film to life.

The Beetlejuice Beetlejuice director went on to direct two stop-motion features, Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie in the time that it took for Selick to complete Nightmare, and Selick went on to make other stop-motion features like Coraline and Netflix’s Wendell & Wild.

“I mean, Coraline is based on a really good book by Neil Gaiman. That didn’t hurt. On [Wendell & Wild], my collaborator is Jordan Peele – and that is the reason we were able to set this up. So I really, truly like to collaborate. But I’m the one leading the team to make the movie.”

Henry Selick Directed The Nightmare Before Christmas — Not Tim Burton

Henry Selick is getting tired of the misconception, and wouldn’t you? He chatted to AV Club about the misbelief and how he feels it’s a bit unfair that Burton gets all the credit. “That was a little unfair because it wasn’t called ‘Tim Burton’s Nightmare’ until three weeks before the film came out. And I would have been fine with that, if that’s what I signed up for.”

Selick, however, doesn’t discredit the work that the Batman Returns director put into the film. “I mean, Tim is a genius-or he certainly was in his most creative years. I always thought his story was perfect, and he designed the main characters,” Selick said. “But it was really me and my team of people who brought that to life.”

It seems Selick still looks at the situation with a bit of humour, though, as he has joked that if you ask Danny Elfman who gets credit for the movie’s success, Elfman would say it’s his movie. “When we finished the film, it was so funny because he came up to me and shook my hand. ‘Henry, you’ve done a wonderful job illustrating my songs!’ And he was serious, and I loved it! Fine,” Selick said. “But my thing was I’m going to hang in there long enough to where people actually say, ‘Oh, that guy Henry, he does stuff.’”

I think it’s perfectly normal for an artist to want credit for their work, especially with something as widely successful as The Nightmare Before Christmas.

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Do you think Tim Burton should get full credit for The Nightmare Before Christmas?