The Nightmare Before Christmas, often promoted as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, is a 1993 American stop motion dark fantasy musical film directed by Henry Selick, and produced and conceived by Tim Burton. It tells the story of Jack Skellington, a character from "Halloween Town" who opens a portal to "Christmas Town" and decides to celebrate the holiday, with some dastardly and comical consequences. Danny Elfman wrote the film score. The principal voice cast includes Chris Sarandon, Kath Soucie, Jess Harnell, Ken Page, Paul Reubens and Glenn Shadix.
The Nightmare Before Christmas originated in a poem written by Tim Burton in 1982, while he was working as an animator at Walt Disney Feature Animation. With the success of Vincent in the same year, the Walt Disney Studios started to consider developing The Nightmare Before Christmas as either a short film or 30-minute television special. Over the years, Burton's thoughts regularly returned to the project, and in 1990, he made a development deal with Disney. Production started in July 1991 in San Francisco. Disney released the film through the Touchstone Pictures banner because the studio believed the film would be "too dark, and scary for kids."
The film has since been reissued by Walt Disney Pictures and re-released annually in the Disney Digital 3-D format from 2006 until 2009, making it the first stop-motion animated feature to be entirely converted to 3D.