Oscar Horrors: "What's This?!?" an Animated Visual FX Nominee
Monday, October 29, 2012 at 7:29PM 
Here lies… The Pumpkin King of The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the visual effects that made him dance.
The work of Pete Kozachik, Eric Leighton, Ariel Valesco-Shaw and Gordon Baker holds a unique place in the history of the Academy’s visual effects category. As the first – and as of 2012, the last – soley animated film to receive a nomination in this category, it earned the visual effects branch’s respect like none before or since. Oh sure, Mary Poppins and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? won the category in their respective years, but those trophies came predominantly for the way they integrated animation with live action. The Nightmare Before Christmas, however, earned its nomination for the way Henry Selick’s stop-motion universe came to life thanks to innovative camera techniques.
While many may think this film’s idea of “visual effects” lays exclusively at the floating ghosts and shape-shifting shadows that pepper Henry Selick’s visual palate, the Oscar nomination was more a reward for the way the cameras were developed with computer technology to help navigate the heavily-designed “claymation” world.
More on this 1993 Oscar Race after the jump...
Nominated against Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and the Sly Stallone-starring Cliffhanger, the Tim Burton production never stood a chance for the win, but that the Academy saw fit to nominate the technical advances of The Nightmare Before Christmas over the explosions of The Last Action Hero, the mechanical whales of Free Willy, and various assorted stunt-heavy movies is a testament.
The blockbuster landscape of 1993 was far different that it is nearly 20 years later. Of the year’s 20 highest grossing titles (of which Christmas is not a member) there aren’t too many that leap out as visual effects extravaganzas. Gosh, two years later in 1995 they could find only TWO nominees (Babe and Apollo 13). Now as the category has been permenantly expanded to five nominees, that not-to-distant statistic sounds rather lovely.
Visual effects nominations for an animated film will probably never happened again. Stop-motion animated titles like ParaNorman or Frankenweenie (another Tim Burton work) will find it nigh on impossible to do battle with the likes of The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Life of Pi and so on in this or any other year from now on. We joke about “here lies…” at the start of each of these Oscar Horror pieces, and yet one could very truthfully write a eulogy for the possibility of animated films ever reaching the visual effects race ever again. Even when a WALL•E makes the nomination longlist, that final hurdle of far more obvious, in your face effects proves too high to overcome.
It makes me wonder though why developing technology to create the 3D environments of the (arguably “animated”) world of Avatar and its ilk is considered a “visual effect”, but Pixar’s ability to build software create finite creature details down to the most complicated pixel are merely considered “animation”. These “living animations” (as Burton calls them in the Nightmare DVD extras) are some of the greatest and most rewarding special effects of the ‘90s.
Reader Comments (4)
Just watched this move the other day. I love it so much.
Well, Zero clearly wasn't made of clay, so I sort of hold out a bit of hope for ParaNorman, a large chunk of which was (blatantly) not made with the main animation tools. The reason something like WALL-E doesn't get a VFX nod is because, well, everything looked like it was done with the animation tools. Jarring and yet still awesome looking will unfortunately beat smooth integration every day.
On a related note, does anyone happen to know if animated movies are eligible in other technical categories? For instance, I really think The Nightmare Before Christmas deserved a nod for Best Production Design (or Best Art Direction, as it used to be called), but are animated films even allowed to compete in categories like that? I would think they should be, since the name of the category leads me to believe it's the design that counts and not whether the production elements were actually built into a functioning set, but I don't know. For that matter, can an animated movie be nominated for Best Cinematography? I doubt the cinematography branch would ever nominate an animated film since they don't use cameras or actual lighting, but most animated movies nonetheless have credited directors of photography. Finding Nemo probably deserved a nomination if it was eligible.
They're eligible. The branches, however, are surely uninterested in nominating it. Although didn't THE INCREDIBLES win an art directors guild something something? Maybe I'm making that up. With the rise of Pixar using real cinematographers as "guides", you never know.