Wednesday 17 November 2010

Context & Review (Atmosphere/Mood/Design) : The Nightmare Before Christmas

Working individually this time, I was tasked with choosing a short film or clip that showed Atmosphere/Mood/Design in an interesting way.

After much deliberation, I decided to go with the 1993 stop-motion classic - "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas". I decided to use the film's introduction, which featured the song "This Is Halloween", sung by many of the characters 'starring' in the movie. Unfortunately, the HD clip could not be embedded, so the SD version can be seen below;


Alternatively, if you absolutely must see the HD version, it can be found here.

Starting with the atmosphere of the clip, the story begins in a abandoned forest which features a narrator introducing the story (setting the scene). This use of narration immediately gives the film a fairytale atmosphere, and (almost) prepares us for the visual diversity and creative setting we are about to enter.

As we travel through the graveyard, one of the most prominent visual features is the carefully controlled lighting. There are lots of shadows and areas of darkness, which add to the anxiety of the scene, playing on the human fear of the unknown - there could quite easily be monsters hiding amongst the shadows. This effect is continued, with silhouette characters appearing on gravestones - we know they are monsters, but without details, our mind creates a stronger monster than is probably there.

After this graveyard scene, we are then introduced to monsters we can see, although these 'conform' to familiar stereotypes - such as the monster hiding under the bed, vampires or werewolves. The careful use of lighting continues here, and spotlights are used to draw focus and lead us through the scene. Coloured lighting is also used to highlight particular characters or props (such as the well, which glows green).

All of these elements contribute to enhancing the atmosphere of the world we are entering, which is clearly a dark, gloomy, monster-infested graveyard.

However, the mood of the clip is very different, and this is primarily thanks to the cabaret-like style of the song and music. Although the lyrics describe the atmosphere, and introduce the monsters, they do so in a light-hearted way. Bearing in mind the likelihood of a younger audience, this ensures that the night-time graveyard does not become too scary, and encourages viewers to continue watching.

The design of the characters and locations is exquisite. Although there are a huge amount of characters introduced in such a short space of time, they are easily identifiable thanks to a large amount of diversity in the character design. Also, all of the buildings are skew, and out of alignment, adding to the visual interest already created.

Most importantly however, is the careful use of exaggeration. Using Jack Skellington as an example, he is a skeleton character - although not dimensioned as he should be, he is 'extra-lanky' which makes him more interesting to look at, and certainly more memorable (he is definately a well-remembered, iconic character in today's culture). Halloween Town's Mayor is also another great example - he has different sides to his personality, represented by a head which has a face on each side, and rotates to a different expression as his emotions change.

One important point to consider here, is that even though we have this extremely colourful musical piece, during which we meet our two main characters (Jack and Sally), neither of them sing. By introducing contrast in this way, it identifies their importance, by showing that they are different from the rest of the characters.

Overall, I chose The Nightmare Before Christmas for many reasons, and without even realising what many of them were. After looking closer, it has only made me want to watch the rest of the film even more...

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