The Nightmare Before Christmas
The Nightmare Before Christmas (also known as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas) is a 1993 American stop-motion animated musical dark fantasy Halloween-Christmas film directed by Henry Selick, and produced and conceived by Tim Burton. It tells the story of Jack Skellington, the King of "Halloween Town" who stumbles through a portal to "Christmas Town" and decides to celebrate the holiday. Danny Elfman wrote the songs and score, and provided the singing voice of Jack. The principal voice cast also includes Chris Sarandon, Catherine O'Hara, William Hickey, Ken Page, Paul Reubens, Glenn Shadix, and Ed Ivory.
Clay animation
A variation of clay animation was developed by another Vinton animator, Craig Bartlett, for his series of Arnold short films (also made in the late-1980s/early-1990s), in which he not only used clay painting but sometimes built up clay images that rose off the plane of the flat support platform toward the camera lens to give a more 3-D stop-motion look to his films.
Some of the best-known clay-animated works include the Gumby series of television show segments (created by Art Clokey) , The California Raisins advertising campaign by Will Vinton Productions studio and The WB's "The PJs", produced by and featuring the voice of Eddie Murphy. Clay animation has also been used in Academy Award-winning short films such as "Closed Mondays" (Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner, 1974) , "The Sand Castle" (1977), "Creature Comforts" (Aardman Animations, 1989), and all four Wallace and Gromit short films, created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. Aardman also created "The Presentators", a series of one-minute clay-animation/CGI short films aired on Nickelodeon UK. Some clay animations appear online, on such sites as Newgrounds. In addition, many of the Rankin/Bass holiday specials were clay-animated.