Reception
While Yvonne Tasker notes "the complex characterization seen in The Nightmare Before Christmas," Michael A. Morrison discusses the influence of Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas on the film, writing that Jack parallels the Grinch and Zero parallels Max, the Grinch's dog. Philip Nel writes that the film "challenges the wisdom of adults through its trickster characters" contrasting Jack as a "good trickster" with Oogie Boogie, whom he also compares with Dr. Seuss's Dr. Terwilliker, as a bad trickster. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic see the characters as presented in a more negative light and criticise the film's characters as having racial constructs, with the protagonists using "whitespeak" and the antagonist, Oogie Boogie, using "blackspeak."
This perception was not entirely unanticipated by the filmmakers. Danny Elfman was worried the characterization of Oogie Boogie would be considered racist by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As Delgado and Stefancic's book reveals, Elfman's predictions became true. Nevertheless, director Henry Selick stated the character was inspired from the Betty Boop cartoon The Old Man of the Mountain. "Cab Calloway would dance his inimitable jazz dance and sing "Minnie the Moocher" or "Old Man of the Mountain", and they would rotoscope him, trace him, turn him into a cartoon character, often transforming him into an animal, like a walrus," Selick continued. "I think those are some of the most inventive moments in cartoon history, in no way racist, even though he was sometimes a villain. We went with Ken Page, who is a black singer and he had no problem with it".
Regardless of the above controversy, Entertainment Weekly reports that fan reception of these characters borders on obsession, profiling "Laurie and Myk Rudnick a couple who are extremely interested in the motion picture The Nightmare Before Christmas. Their degree of obsession with that film is so great that...they named their son after the real-life person that a character in the film is based on." This enthusiasm for the characters has spread beyond North America to Japan. As Stephen Jones writes, "The Japanese also seemed to go crazy for Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas with a fourteen-inch Jack Skellington doll, a gold 'Millennium' edition and a twelve-inch version dressed in pyjamas; a ten-inch Sandy Claws doll; a reversible pillow featuring Jack; a hand-painted set with Lock, Shock and Barrel, or a similar set of four vampires; a set of pull-back racers featuring Jack's faithful dog Zero...a Zero necklace, and various die-cast Jack key-chains, amongst numerous other items."
Bryan Theiss explains this enthusiasm in The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide: "The last time I went to Disneyland, I saw more Jack Skellington hats than Mickey ears...because Jack and Sally are...those rare fantasy characters we can relate to on a certain level as much as we can to real-world characters on a more literal level." Jamie Frater adds, "Jack is perfectly realized as the 'town hero' who seeks more in his life (or death, as it may be), a place we all find ourselves time to time. Sally is loverlorn and pines for Jack to not only love her, but to just notice her."
Read more about this topic: List Of The Nightmare Before Christmas Characters
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)