THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (Directed by Henry Selick)

The perfect antidote for all the gooey fare foisted upon parents in the season of big spending, here’s an animated adventure in which Santa Claus is kidnapped and tortured by a bunch of the weirdest creatures ever to grace a cinema screen.

Produced by Tim Burton from his own macabre, children’s book, this is not so much a nightmare as a rollercoaster ghost train, a gleefully ghoulish tale of the misguided efforts of the freaky fairground inhabitants of Halloweentown to bring their own special talents to the Christmas festivities. Displaying the same touch for wildly imaginative, otherworldly comedy as he did in Beetlejuice, combined with the fairy tale aura of Edward Scissorhands and the spectacular design of his Batman films, Burton’s first feature length animation makes Disney look like a bunch of wimps (the production company, Touchstone, is actually a Disney subsidiary, but presumably the senior honchos thought it would be a bit risky to let Burton’s nasty little creations frolic around under the same family banner as Bambi and Simba).

Burton and director Henry Selick have opted for stop action puppetry, given big screen cinematic polish by computer assisted micro-camera movement. The story races along at a breathless pace, with the dense and dazzling visual allure of a Jan Svankmajer animation, but the many likeable characters, witty sub-Brechtian songs, light-hearted black humour and fairy tale plotting make it far more accessible than any of the Czech’s films. Burton’s humour comes from the far side, but his collection of little monsters are too hilariously harmless to really scare the little monsters of your own. Never more malicious than, say, The Simpsons, or frightening than The Addams Family, A Nightmare Before Christmas is a parent’s dream: a children’s fantasy that you will actually enjoy being dragged into.