As we grow older, some of the things we used to love just fade away but some childhood obsessions are here to stay! Everyone has a guilty childhood pleasure they can’t let go of, because in this crazy world we can see it as our only escape from reality. I’m still obsessed with The Nightmare before Christmas because even though it’s a movie meant for little kids, as I grow older I’m capable of being more analytical, and I can find even more reasons to love it! The film is following the misadventures of The Pumpkin King, Jack Skellington to find who he is. Jack is tired of the same old routine of being the Pumpkin King, even though it is fun to scare and to have the title of the Pumpkin King in Halloweentown. Other holidays seem more fun, and Christmas was the lucky one!It wasn’t easy to produce such a complicated movie directed by Henry Selick and Tim Burton, but it was worth all of the hard work after seeing the cinematic production.

1.Tim Burton was not present during most of the film making.

Selick even reveals that Burton was on set for only about 8-10 days during the movies filming.Tim Burton was not on the scene most of the time to help direct the film alongside Henry Selick because he was busy directing Batman at the time. A lot of people still get this wrong because with the movie having it’s original title "Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas", it can still be very confusing even though he did create the story and produce the movie.

2.Tim Burton was inspired by the transition of different holiday decorations in a store display.

Tim Burton was working for Disney at the time when he was inspired by the transition in a store from advertising Halloween decorations to Christmas decorations. "When I was working at Disney, I designed something that's like the reverse of that [Holiday classics]..."

3.Burton had a fever when he thought of the characters.

Burton revealed to MTV that he thought of the characters for The Nightmare Before Christmas while he was hallucinating with a fever of 108. Burton commented that, "I think that's where you get your best ideas, the ones that kind of come out of your subconscious. They always have more power that way."

4. "The Nightmare Before Christmas" was created with stop motion animation.

Stop motion animation is an art form that could potentially drive someone insane but he couldn't see doing it any other way, Burton notes. At a rate of 24 frames per second, one minute of filmmaking would take about 1 week to accomplish, Supervising Animator Eric Leighton provides. “A team of over 100 artists and technicians spent about 3 years to push the limits of this cinematic art form.” Tim Burton went with this 3-D like claymation animation because bringing this story to life in what seems like another dimension just makes it much more powerful.

5."The Nightmare Before Christmas" is not a perfectly made film.

Jack Skellington sabotaging Christmas seemed to make this “Nightmare” adjust well to it’s animation and it’s characters. Upon the surface of The Nightmare Before Christmas presents a ton of imperfections and that’s what comes with wanting to do claymation, but that sat perfectly well with Burton. The imperfections are what made the film the cinematic genius that it is.

6.There was no technical direction as to where Tim Burton wanted to go with this film as far as the musical part of it.

There wasn’t a script to the music of the movie, Tim only had a storyline from a couple of years ago Danny could work off of so Tim would describe different scenes of the movie to songwriter Danny Elfman, and he would immediately come up with songs that would correspond to Burton’s ideas and his sketches of the characters. Danny had some interesting visual stimuli to get him going on songwriting for the movie.

7. A total of 230 sets were built and they all were about 24 inches.

Many of the sets were able to break apart so that the animators wouldn’t have to reach more than two feet for a puppet. Sometimes trap doors would be built in the set too, so they can physically open the stage, do the animation, and close the trap door so they aren't visible says Gregg Olsson, the Set Designer for the film.The sets were built in miniature, but they were lit as if they were full-sized movie sets.

8. Some scenes would require 20 to 30 different miniature lights to create the dramatic effects.

Big, sweeping camera movements helped to portray the sets as much larger than they actually were.

9. Jack Skellington’s clay model has over 400 heads with different facial expressions that simply pop on his body.

What about the other characters you ask? Other characters like Sally also has several different facial expressions, but with Sally having her long, red hair, it isn’t as easy just to pop her head off and put a new one on. Sally, along with other characters, has a mask on that goes up to about her hairline so it’s easy to remove.

10. Henry Selick came up with the idea to add pinstripes to Jack’s suit

If it were an all black suit like Tim Burton intended, it would blend too well with the background of Halloweentown.

11.The film was influenced by German expressionism as seen in one of Tim Burton’s first original film "Vincent."

"Vincent" also uses stop motion animation and claymation, "The Nightmare Before Christmas" was a huge project to Tim Burton and Henry Selick.

12. Disney wanted to see "The Nightmare Before Christmas 2"

Disney pushed for a sequel to "The Nightmare Before Christmas", but Tim Burton shot the idea down because he believed he wanted to keep the movie pure. He wants to “keep the purity of the project”, and although some of us would like to see a sequel, The Nightmare Before Christmas is too great of a movie on its own to be compared with anything else.