As the clip ended, Hahn explained the armature we saw was the Wolfman's armature, "But let's talk about Jack's armature," he continued, "he was really tiny."

"The challenge with the Jack armature was," Kathleen Gavin volunteered, "you know most armatures are fairly, you know, they're about a half inch, quarter-inch, they're pretty substantial. Jack was so thin that it was really a challenge for the animators not to like, break his whole arms off. And, uh, Mike did you ... You animated with Jack, did you not?"

"Yeah, as far as the design goes, I remember Henry first showing the design to Tim and him going, 'The tiny-little feet,' And you know, these characters, to move them around, we have to drill the set and tie them down so you gotta have a ball joint to support that weight and the armature department was amazing because they were able to get pretty small ball joints ... It was just an incredible piece of art."

"The lead armature designer had worked on the Star Wars films," Henry Selick continued Mike Belzer's story, "He had seen it all, done it all, but this was his greatest challenge. He figured out a way to do it and Jack's tiny feet are actually machined bits of metal. Tim's extremely beautiful designs, and going for it, not just saying, 'Well, we'll put big feet on the ankles because that's what stop motion is.' No, it was pushing the medium ... we found ways to do it. I think I've mentioned, Sally, she's a little more substantial than Jack, a little more full-figured than Jack. She needed a little more support in the ankles otherwise she wouldn't have been able to walk on her own. It took a little convincing, but I got Tim to buy off on 'we'll put socks,' 'As long as they're striped,' he said. And the socks were able to disguise her slightly thicker ankles."

Another clip of the work that goes into a film like this was shown. It was amazing to me to learn that if there's one little thing wrong, the entire sequence has to be reshot. The voice in the clip explained, "It's not like a cell-animated film where if you have a little problem with the frame you can go back and erase that line, redraw it, and rephotograph it. If you have a problem with the frame, you have to go back and redo the entire thing. So, you've always got that sort of pressure on top of your head that you know, while you're in the middle of a 400 frame shot, that's taken 10 days to shoot, you know, on the ninth day, if something goes wrong, There goes Christmas!"

Adding on even more information about the difficulty of shooting a stop motion animated film, Don Hahn explained how the puppets get their facial expression, "There's another style of animation, you can see the animators moving the faces around, but it's called head-replacement. Can you talk about that," he asked Henry Selick, "because Jack is all head-replacement."

"Different characters in Nightmare used different types of facial animation. We filmed Jack in particular, we wanted the most expressive range and so we gave up smoothness, or in-betweens, in favor of him being able to pull the corner of his mouth apart, sad, happy, and ..he's a very lively character. He needs broad expressions. We went with replacements and in his case, we were able to ... his whole head would be replaced for every expression. So we had sort of sad-serious, happy-serious. Other characters had partial replacements, others had more traditional latex faces."

"You must have had hundreds of heads then for Jack because he has his, like you said, all his expressions, and his dialogue," Hahn observed.

"We were tripping on the heads," Selick replied, "We had hundreds of heads"

Hahn introduced another clip, "All the vowel sounds, wistful, all that. I brought a clip along that shows some of those Jack heads. You can see how they came together in the film."

As we watched, the voice in the clip explained the complexities of animating Jack's expressions, "To animate Jack's facial expressions and mouth movements the animators used hundred of hand sculpted replacement heads. So every time he makes a different mouth expression, a-e-i-o-u, then everything in-between and then in a mad way, or sad, way, or happy way, or neutral way, we have to have a whole different sculpt of the head. We might use as many as 400 distinctly different Jack heads. Those are read as exposure sheets so we know precisely when to change the mouth position. And how you make the character blink... for Jack, we have these replacement series; so what I do is, I just take these (the eyeball part) and place them into Jack's eyes. I do that for both eyes, and after I take that frame photo, I take this (the eye replacement) out, close it a little bit more, take the frame of film, and then put the closed eye in. I might do this for three frames, so you're getting a very quick action of just a blink which brings the character to life even that much more. And that's just one more element of his realism." The clip's narrator then casually added a statement that I think defines what makes Disney special, "Just an extra touch."

Photo: Sarah Gillanders

"Just an extra touch, yeah," Hahn reiterated, and turned his attention to Mike Belzer and his animation bay, "What's that pointer," he asked.

Belzer playfully replied, "I'm a little busy over here, what?"

"No, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to throw you off as much as I can," Hahn joked and asked again, "What's that pointer thing you're using?"

Belzer looked at the little pointy stick that hovered over the metal puppet armature's head and replied, "It's called a surface gauge. And basically, it's a point in space for me to see how far to move the puppet. Without it, if you just move the puppet, you don't know where he was ... It really is for hands-on right there to see what's going on."

As Mike Belzer continued animating, Kathleen Gavin explained where they got the animators to work on Nightmare Before Christmas, "Our crew came from, California Grapes and things. There had not been a feature film, a feature-length film of stop motion, and when you do the Pillsbury Dough Boy, it's 30 seconds. You could do a scene that's 30 seconds, one shot. And so, the difference for everybody was amazing. What I loved about this crew is, their whole lives, they wanted to do a stop motion film. And, this was their opportunity and I've never worked with a group of people who, every day came in and loved their work and wanted to do it, despite our difficulties, which we had many. But, they were really enthusiastic about doing this because it's something they wanted to do their whole lives and this was their opportunity."

"So Henry," Hahn redirected, "You had your 18 million dollar budget and you got your Pillsbury Dough Boy animators, but when you look back, now with 14 years distance, and you see the kind of event that your movie has become ... Did you know that? Did you feel it? Did you sense it? Are you shocked? How does that feel?

Photo: Sarah Gillanders

Henry Selick, who really seems kind of shy, quietly replied, "Um, no sense that it would have a long life. We, I think, we all loved the project, and it's almost like we felt that we all loved it so much the rest of the world's bound not to."

"Because that's always the way things work," Hahn acknowledged.

"We really got to put, there's virtually no politics," Selick explained, "all the energy went into making the movie. Kathleen was a big, big, part of that. Tim, with the success he had in a lot of actions was a big big part of that. So we loved working on it. Obviously, it was very difficult but we were just happy we were making it and happy it was going to get released. After that, we had no, we couldn't have imagined that it would have a life."

Hahn's reply got a big response from the audience. As a fan of both Nightmare and Disneyland, I was cheering too, "Yeah, it's become this huge event. The last clip I brought along today was a part of that event, which is the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. We sent a film crew down there during the middle of the night when they dress the place and early in the mornings, and shot some time-lapse coverage of them dressing the Haunted Mansion as Nightmare Before Christmas. Here it is .."

Ah, Dear Readers, what a treat. All this insight into the creative process and a chance to see the Haunted Mansion magically transformed into Haunted Mansion Holiday? Bliss. I was in heaven.

But wait, as they say in commercials, there's more. The evening wasn't done yet, there was still a treat or two in store for those of us lucky enough to be there.

"The time together is drawing to a close here," Don Hahn said, "and I'm hoping Mike, that you have finished your animation.

Some of the original sets and puppets are on display in the theater's lower level
Photos: Sarah Gillanders

"I feel like a rodeo clown," Belzer replied.

"Exactly, like a calf-roper," continued Hahn.

"Uh, yeah, we've got something to see. No promises," said Belzer modestly.

"It's live theatre so let's hope this works," Don Hahn advised, "And if we can guys, let's go and see what Mike's done in the last half hour here."

And overhead, on the huge El Capitan screen, magic took place. The little metal stick figure Mike Belzer had been fussing over all evening, the little figure that didn't look like much, suddenly began to move, dance around, and fling its arms in the air in a kind of "ta-da" moment. If that's not cool, I don't know what is and Don Hahn concurred, "I think that's just magic. I mean, I'm sorry but that shouldn't happen."

That certainly would have been more than enough for one evening. One could not expect any better and I'm sure all in attendance would have been fully satisfied had the night ended there. But there was one more extra touch.

"Now it comes to a part in our program," Hahn announced, "Remember when I came out first, I said we had an extraordinary surprise for you today? Um, and I'll start it off with a question to Henry, which is ... to ask Henry, 'What have you been working on?'"

"I think I could talk about this for couple of years," Selick replied, "because it took a while for it to get going. But, I've been working on another stop-motion film called Coraline. Don Hahn has come up and visited us and Kathleen (Gavin) and a few others, but it's with a lot of the original crew from Nightmare, quite a few of the people that you see here, a little older, none the wiser, though."

Hahn continued his host's duties, "Not only are we going to show about 10 minutes of clips from Coraline 3D, and bear in mind, they're not finished, there's some blue screening, you'll see the rigs that are used to hold puppets when they jump in the air still attached, so it's semi-rough footage. But, we also happen to have a special guest ... the author of Coraline, Neil Gaiman, is here."

Neil Gaiman - Photo: Sarah Gillanders

A tall, dark-haired man suddenly bounded to the stage and there he was, the author of one of my favorite books. Don Hahn asked him how the Coraline movie came about and Gaiman explained, "I finished Coraline about 18 months, maybe two years before it was published and gave it to my agent at CAA and basically said, 'Can you send this to Henry Selick?' I'd loved everything he'd done and thought it would be wonderful and it went off to Henry and he liked it. He called back. and then, in the way that these things go, like the wind, it only took us six or seven years. Originally, we were going to do it live-action, am I'm so glad that fell through."

"Ah, it was never going to be live action," Henry Selick said, "that's just how it was going at one moment in time."

"I know. And now, it's amazing," Neil Gaiman added.

And so ... we got a very special moment. We got to see what Coraline looks like. Since they asked of the audience to just enjoy and do nothing more than brag to friends that one had seen it, I will say no more than that ... except, one of my very favorite books is looking pretty good on the screen. And like so many other moments in the evening, like so many moments I experience at Disneyland, seeing the snippets of Coraline was just an extra touch. And that's what makes Disney, Disney. The extra touch. Isn't it grand?

The Details

Mickey's Halloween Treat is sold out.

Digitally Projected in 3-D, The Nightmare Before Christmas runs through November 18th at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. Organist Rob Richards performs before each screening on the Mighty Wurlitzer, and there is a display of some of the film's original sets and character puppets in the lower level of the theater.

Show times (subject to change, of course) are:

10am, 12:15pm, 2:30pm, 4:45pm, 7pm 9:15pm and a special 11:30pm Sing-A-Long performance featuring lyrics on-screen.

General Admission Prices are:

Adults $11 | Child (3-11) $10 | Senior (60+) $10

VIP Admission (includes popcorn, soft drink, reserved seat and no waiting in line):

$22

Tickets may be purchased at the theater, via phone at 1-800-DISNEY6 (1-800-347-6396) or online at www.elcapitantickets.com with a service fee added for the latter two methods. (Groups of twenty or more may purchase specially discounted $9 tickets in advance, but this may only be done by calling 1-818-845-3110 as these tickets are not available at the box office.) Birthday parties are also welcomed at the same phone number.

The El Capitan Theater is located in Hollywood California at 6838 Hollywood Boulevard. Theater lobby-validated $2 (first four hours only) parking is available underground in the Hollywood & Highland complex (adjacent to the Chinese Theater) across the street.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is rated PG; parental guidance suggested. Some material may not be suitable for children. Some scary images.

© 2007 Sue Kruse

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