O Estranho Mundo de Jack

I'm not sure I've ever seen a fantasy film that's at once so visually amazing and so emotionally dead.

A work of grand visual wit, clever songs, funny gags and genuine pathos, it is perhaps the greatest stop-motion animated film ever, a painstaking style of model animation that computers have all but completely done away with.

Visually a macabre knockout, this 75-minute fantasy boasts some of the wittiest, most vigorous stop-motion animation effects in the history of the process.

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas has a grotesque charm, a pie-eyed magic.

Burton and his collaborators present a movie musical that's like nothing you've ever seen.

If the 3-D fails to grab you as much as you might hope, it never takes you out of the movie, which is a remarkable feat.

Flattened for years on cable and video, Nightmare has been resurrected in all its tactile glory.

Burton's skewed vision is seamlessly realized by director Henry Selick and cleverly enhanced by Danny Elfman's songs.

Thirteen years after its debut, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas has gone 3D, which makes a good thing even better.

I'm blown away by just the construction of the scenes, and by all of the effects that have been incorporated to make everything move fluidly; and there's also this charming imperfection to the animation that just makes it so gorgeous.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is a veritable bounty of visual delights.

Part avant-garde art film, part amusing but morbid fairy tale, it is a delightfully ghoulish holiday musical that displays more inventiveness in its brief 75 minutes than some studios can manage in an entire year.

This full-length animated movie was shot in stop motion, with all the febrile, twittery fascination that the medium exerts; it has a magic-toy shop feeling, with unexpected objects stuttering into life.

Burton, the man who gave us Batman, Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, is incapable of a conventional idea. His take on the holiday fairy tale is delightfully off the wall.

This cautionary fable (Be True to Your Ghoulish Self) may be a little too twisted for little kids but anyone 8 or older will spot the friendly glint behind jack's empty eye sockets.

A fun house of funereal glamour.

The set designs are ingenious and the songs (music and lyrics by Danny Elfman) are fairly good.

The dazzling techniques employed here create a strikinglook that's never been seen in such sustained form, making this a unique curio that will appeal to kids and film enthusiasts alike.

This is the movie puts the "oooh" back in "boo."

The Nightmare Before Christmas is a major step forward for both stop-motion animation, which is stunningly well used, and for Mr. Burton himself. He now moves from the level of extremely talented eccentric to that of Disney-style household word.