Celebrate a hi-def Halloween with The Nightmare Before Christmas: Collector's Edition

Before he started cranking out Batman movies, ruining Planet of the Apes and singing up storm with Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, filmmaker/Goth-poster-child Tim Burton briefly worked in the animation department at Disney. As unbelievable as this might seem he actually did some work on The Fox and the Hound before deciding that this wasn't the life for him.

During his time at Disney he also made a couple of short films (more on those later) and wrote a creepy three-page Christmas poem about a skeleton that kidnaps Santa and messes up Christmas. The House of Mouse clearly thought that there was some mileage in Burton's twisted festive tale and decided to produce the piece as either a short film or a TV special. Nothing came of it, but over the following years Burton continued to return to the piece, with the hopes of doing something with it. Flash forward to the early '90s and Burton finally makes a deal with Disney (which still owned the rights to the poem) to turn it into an animated feature.

Directed by Henry Selick from a screenplay by Caroline Thompson, the resulting stop-motion animated feature is one the highpoints in Disney's filmmaking endeavours over the past two decades. Not that the company originally saw it that way. Scared that The Nightmare Before Christmas was 'too dark' for its core audience of young children (which makes you wonder just how out of touch with kids the company was during the early '90s) Disney opted to release the film under its Touchstone Pictures banner instead of Walt Disney Pictures. Given a cinema release in America in October 1993 the film ended up making back around $50million, a fair return on a budget of $18million, but not quite the kind of stratospheric box office that a Disney animation usually scored (the previous years Aladdin did over $217million from a budget of around £28million).

However, when it was finally released on video, The Nightmare Before Christmas finally found its audience. First becoming a cult hit, before going on to become something of a family favourite. At the same time the film became something of a sensation in Japan, generating an insane amount of merchandise (much of which has only recently started turning up in the West) that has proven to be a continual best-seller since the film original hit cinemas there. Since then the film has been adopted by Walt Disney Pictures as one of its own, with the Haunted Mansion attraction at the Disneyland parks in California and Japan now getting special season makeovers based on the film each Halloween.

For the film's hi-def debut, Walt Disney Home Entertainment has employed a stunning AVC 1080p encode presenting the film in its original 1.66:1 aspect ratio (with black bars at the sides of the screen). While some might bemoan the lack of the 3D version of the film that was produced for cinemas several years ago, the quality of this original 2D version is simply breathtaking. The 35mm source material hold a few little speckles that could possibly have been removed with a more thorough restoration, but otherwise this is a fantastic looking Blu-ray disc with flawless colour reproduction, not to mention masses of fine detailing and textures, in the image. The presence of natural film grain would also indicate that Disney hasn't succumbed to employing excessive DNR processing in order to appease the PS3 crowd.

Given the film's musical nature it was important that The Nightmare Before Christmas's soundtrack was given just as much care and attention as the imagery for this Blu-ray release. So, instead of the uncompressed PCM 5.1 that Disney brings to the majority of its European Blu-ray releases, The Nightmare... comes packed with a Dolby TrueHD 7.1 track. The result is a warm and expansive soundtrack that is just as much at home with the big musical numbers as it is with subtle atmospherics and dialogue.

The disc is also awash with extra features, many of which have been taken from the previous Special Edition DVD release. Of these, arguably the most important are the two early Tim Burton short films Vincent and Frankenweenie. The former is another piece of stop-motion animation paying homage to Vincent Price and Edgar Allan Poe, while the latter is a longer live-action short film that pays tribute to the classic horror films that clearly played such a large part in Burton's childhood. The filmmaker clearly remains very fond of the latter tale as this Blu-ray features a new video introduction by Burton to the short, and he is currently working on a feature-length stop-motion animated version of Frankenweenie for cinema release.

Also brought across from the DVD are a trio of deleted scenes in storyboard form, three extended scenes and one deleted scene that made it all the way to being animated before being cut, a 25min Making of... documentary, a storyboard-to-film comparison, art galleries and trailers.

But, as that clearly wasn't enough for Jack Skellington's legions of fans, we also have some new bonus features to enjoy. First up is a commentary by Tim Burton, director Henry Selick and music producer Danny Elfman, which replaces the track Selick provided with cinematographer Pete Kozachik for the earlier DVD. It's actually a piece-meal affair cut together from separate recordings (Selick's contributions seems to originate from his previous chat track), but that doesn't stop this from being a fascinating look back at the film's creation. And it's a hell of a lot better than the faultering solo tracks Burton has recorded for films in the past. Another great addition is Burton's original poem, narrated by Christopher Lee and accompanied by by animation based on the author's original illustrations. Rounding out the new features are a short video intro to the film by Burton and the chance to check out Jack's Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. This last feature is available in two forms. The first is just a short 7min video tour of the theme park attraction that is little more than an extended ad, but the second runs for an extra 30mins and takes you behind-the-scenes at key moments to look at how the attraction is put together.

Walt Disney Home Entertainment, Region B Blu-ray, £24, On sale now
HCC VERDICT: 5/5