The Original "Nightmare Before Christmas" Poem

Twenty years ago, The Nightmare Before Christmas premiered, directed by animator Henry Selick and produced by Tim Burton. But years before that film hit theaters, Burton wrote a poem entitled The Nightmare Before Christmas. It laid out the plot of what would become the film, and it was one of several concepts he pitched to Disney as a candidate for an animated film (Burton worked as a Disney animator in the early 1980s). Disney didn't bite, leaving the project on the shelf for more than a decade.

Here's a version of The Nightmare Before Christmas read by Christopher Lee, and computer-animated roughly in the style of the stop-motion film. Enjoy!

If you like that, you'll love Tim Burton's Vincent, a Tribute to Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent Price. Stop-motion animation? Check. Vincent Price narration? Check. Excellent poetry? Oh, that's definitely a check.

(Via Open Culture.)