The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Sally puppet head

The Nightmare Before Christmas is a 1993 is a stop motion animation musical fantasy film produced by Tim Burton and directed by Henry Selick. The film follows the story of Jack Skellington from Halloween Town who opens the portal to Christmas Town and celebrates the holiday in comical fantasy style. Upon release The Nightmare Before Christmas was met with critical acclaim, grossing over $80 million at the box office it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. Much of the movies success can be attributed to its incredible production design with beautifully colourful sets and strange characters which were bought to life with amazing realism through the use of stop motion animation, it has since become a cult classic and a benchmark in the animation genre.

The picture was created using 24 frames per second meaning that for every second of footage created each element had to be posed for 24 exposures, roughly translated this equates to one minute of footage taking approximately one week to produce with any mistakes meaning the animators would have to start the sequence again from scratch.

One of the most memorable characters in the movie is undoubtedly Sally, the ragdoll created by Dr. Finkelstein and voiced in the movie by Catherine O'Hara. The puppet head displayed here is an original used during filming whilst bringing the character to life using stop motion animation, in this instance using the replacement method where Sally's face is an appliance, or mask, which can be removed from the head and changed to reflect the various expressions required on camera. Each are attached to the puppet head using ball bearings which locate into recesses on the back of each of the appliances allowing them to be easily interchanged during filming, while there were a number of differing appliances used to convey varying expressions on screen while puppet heads themselves were constructed in much lower numbers.

This represents an incredibly rare example of a complete puppet head for this iconic character who was beautifully bought to life on camera by Tim Burton and Henry Selick.

Status - part of The Prop Gallery collection