You know him as the Pumpkin King and you definitely don't know him as Sandy
Claws — but what do only adults notice about Jack Skellington?
Jack Skellington is known as the Pumpkin King — but what does that title actually mean? Jack
certainly isn't a monarch, and Halloween Town already has a leader: its two-faced mayor. Sure,
Jack helps organize the spooking and scaring that takes place on Halloween and gives some
great speeches along the way, but it's tough to say what exactly he does for an actual job.
So he's a leader who holds no real political power, he supposedly has a knack for motivating
people, and he's a consultant to the powers-that-be… yet it's hard to put
your finger on what exactly he does for a "real" job. It seems like Jack Skellington
is basically Halloween Town's version of the British royal family. Jack truly is royalty as
his title implies, and his status is complete with the abject boredom that you'd expect from
someone who exists to be a figurehead. No wonder he's jealous of the hardworking,
much-credited Santa Claus. At least Santa actually gets to do something.
While Tim Burton wrote his delightfully creepy poem, The Nightmare Before Christmas,
all the way back in 1982, the first Hollywood feature film to truly nail
the director's trademark spooky aesthetic wouldn't come until 1988, with Beetlejuice.
"It's showtime."
Many of the details in Beetlejuice are similar to elements of The Nightmare
Before Christmas. When Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin are brought back in the séance scene,
for example, their faces have the same distinct, wrinkly lines seen on the faces
of the dead in Halloween Town. Beetlejuice uses games as a way to torture the people,
similar to Oogie Boogie's antagonism toward Jack Skellington and Santa Claus. And the
statues coming to life in Beetlejuice are echoed by the kids' walking bathtub in Nightmare. There's
even a ghostly hat decoration in Beetlejuice that looks eerily similar to Jack Skellington.
When Beetlejuice finally gets to have his fun and haunt the humans, he appears wearing a
distinctive hat. At the top is a man with a hollow-eyed skull in a familiar shape,
adorned by a bat that looks a lot like Jack's bowtie. Whether this hat topper is
based on Burton's idea for Jack Skellington or the other way around, the resemblance is unmistakable.
Jack's black-and-white suit looks like it's glued on, and getting it on and off must be
a straight-up nightmare. Moreover, when Jack's Santa suit is destroyed when his
sled is blown up by the military later in the movie, it's revealed that he was
"wearing" his pinstripe suit under the Santa suit the whole time. Therefore,
it would seem Jack never takes his suit off — and we don't know if he actually can.
If he can't, that would make sense for more than just aesthetic reasons. Getting back
to the fact that Jack is a skeleton, and skeletons are held together by soft tissue
that eventually rots away, you could argue that he would fall apart without his suit.
Obviously, there's already a lot of suspension of disbelief that needs to occur in order to accept
most of what we see in Halloween Town. Yet it would make sense that Jack's suit also serves
the purpose of keeping his bones together, just like skin keeps our insides from falling out.
In a sense, Jack Skellington has black-and-white pinstriped skin — like some sort of bipedal zebra.
Why does Jack task Lock, Shock, and Barrel with kidnapping the holiday icon he mistakenly refers
to as "Sandy Claws"? Even more alarmingly, why does he assume that the kids, also referred
to as "Boogie's Boys," wouldn't go right to Oogie Boogie and spill the beans? Seriously,
for a character who's so smart that the Mayor needs his guidance on the yearly Halloween plans,
you've got to wonder: Why would Jack ever trust these impish trick-or-treaters?
For one thing, they're not the sharpest tools in the shed, since they accidentally kidnap
the Easter Bunny instead of Santa. Secondly, everybody in Halloween Town loves Jack and
holds him in the highest esteem: Surely he could have found an eager and loyal helper
anywhere else? So why would he instead pick three kids who, at best, treat him
with amused disdain? It's not like Jack doesn't know about their association with Oogie Boogie.
"And one more thing… leave that no account Oogie Boogie out of this!"
So he knows where their true loyalties lie but decides to count on them anyway.
It seems that Jack isn't as clever as the residents of Halloween Town think.
As he sings the number "Jack's Lament," Jack removes his head, holding it out like Hamlet
holds the exhumed jester Yorick's skull while reciting his famous "Alas, poor Yorick" speech.
The fact that Jack is a skeleton, and can therefore bend the rules of his anatomy,
allows him to embody both Yorick and Hamlet in the recreation of this Shakespearean scene.
While this self-decapitation lasts just for a moment during Jack's sweeping song about
identity and futility, it speaks very strongly to who Jack really is. One part of him is Hamlet,
full of ennui and self-doubt, wondering at the purpose of his existence. But another part of him
is the jester Yorick, the silly fool who can make you laugh and cry, who can tumble and fall and get
back up with a big smile. In this one moment, Jack shows just how complicated he truly is.
In animation, nearly every detail on screen is drawn on purpose, and this goes especially for
a movie produced by a man known for crafting a very specific, detailed aesthetic style. In
The Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skellington's hands show the joints between his knuckles, which
makes sense, as this emphatic leader is big on hand gestures and physical articulation. But if he
needs joints to move his fingers, how does he move his neck? That looks like one single fused bone
rather than a stack of vertebrae. Sure, it has wrinkles, but there don't appear to be any joints.
Based simply on how skeletons work, Jack's neck couldn't bend, twist,
and turn without vertebrae — after all, bones don't move and bend themselves,
but instead achieve mobility through the combined efforts of their muscles and
joints. How does the ever-introspective Jack bend his neck in contemplation and wonderment,
then? Such deep questions, hard-hitting and poignant, may never be answered.
Disney had some serious apprehensions about producing The Nightmare Before Christmas as a
children's movie. Their concerns about the horror elements led Disney to release the film under the
company's "grown-up" subsidiary, Touchstone Pictures, instead of the main Disney label.
"How horrible our Christmas will be."
"No, how jolly!"
The entertainment giant also requested a few changes. For example, Disney execs
demanded that Jack Skellington should have eyes in his sockets.
They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, a fountain of emotion that allows people to relate
to each other — so perhaps Disney was worried that Jack would seem lacking in personality
without them. Or maybe the studio was worried that Jack Skellington would look too sinister
for younger audiences. Luckily, producer-creator Tim Burton and director Henry Selick stood their
ground on the point that Jack is, in fact, a skeleton, and skeletons don't have eyes.
It's a good thing they stood strong too, because Jack, now a beloved character,
doesn't seem to have suffered any kind of hit for having empty eye sockets. In fact, his face is so
expressive that kids may not even notice that he has no eyes — even if Disney definitely did.
Of course, people emote with more than just their eyes. For example, a fair bit of emotion comes
across in the eyebrows and the mouth. Without eyes, Jack has to depend even more on these kinds
of facial reactions. The only problem with this, of course, is that skulls can't actually move.
Muscles and skin create the appearance of brows going up or down, as well as contorting the lips
into a smile or a grimace. The human skull doesn't move in real life, since bone is solid. Certainly,
there has to be some artistic license at play to give a skeleton without eyes some semblance
of emotion, and, to that end, the animators afford Jack's skeletal face the same flexibility he would
have if it were covered in skin. It's almost as if Jack Skellington's skull is made of clay.
There are some weird things going on with Jack Skellington, anatomically speaking.
One aspect of his body that draws a critical eye is that his mouth appears to be stitched
together… except when it's not. The lines running up and down Jack's face could be
seen simply as stylized wrinkly lips at first, like the remnants of flesh in a state of decay.
But if you look toward the back of Jack's skull,
his mouth looks like it's just sewn together. When you think about it, this makes sense:
There are no muscles to hold the bottom and top of his jaw in place. When closed,
his mouth looks like it's strung together. When open, it's as if the threads have magically split,
except towards the back, where they hold the hinges of the jaw together. So you can probably
add another unique feature to Jack's anatomy: Apparently, string can be sewn through his bone
to take the place of muscles and tendons. Jack Skellington is truly a medical marvel.
Jack Skellington is a collection of bones without connective or protective tissue, held together
in large part by a suit, possibly with stitches securing his jaws. You wouldn't think that makes
for a particularly durable body. Yet Jack gets hammered by cannon fire and escapes with little
more than a burned Santa suit. At another point, he leaps around Oogie's projectiles and traps like
a bona fide gymnast. And even if Jack had been hit, he probably would have come out feeling fine.
Take the movie's final act, for example. The Pumpkin King is
blasted out of the sky by the military and springs back up almost immediately,
even retaining enough strength and power to return home and save Santa Claus and
Sally. Perhaps there's some truth to the idea that you can't die twice.