Before Tim Burton started making 'generic Tim Burton' films, he produced this little gem of a picture based off of a story and characters he'd already created. The origin of Nightmare Before Christmas comes from a three-page poem Burton wrote through inspiration from TV specials of Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer and How The Grinch Stole Christmas. The story (once adapted to a screenplay by Burton's good friend, Martin McDowell), follows Jack Skellington - a somewhat celebrity of Halloween, the name of the town in which the film is predominantly set. In a chance visit to Christmas-land, Jack decides that he and his horror cronies should do their own version of Christmas, subsequently kidnapping Father Christmas and delivering, with good intentions, all manner of frightful gifts on Christmas Eve. The film has an IMDB rating of 8.1 - a score high enough to warrant a place on the top 250 list - but is not included due to its insufficient votes total. Tragically, those that have seen consider it worthy of a prestigious spot that would place it in among other classics such as Terminator and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (both of which have a rating of 8.1). Unfortunately it often gets overlooked as being "too weird", unceremoniously bumped down the pecking order of stop-motion movies by the more recent (inferior) films like Corpse Bride, Coraline and Frankenweenie.
