50 pages • 1 hour read
Shea ErnshawLong Live the Pumpkin Queen: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Sally’s Stuffing
Sally often speaks of her stuffing of dried leaves. For example, her leaves rustle or churn with her emotions. She wishes Doctor Finkelstein had stuffed her with something less associated with death, like air-puffed cotton or rose petals that would reflect the kind of person she wishes she was. Her stuffing symbolizes her sense of not being what she should be.
After her return home as queen of Halloween Town, Sally mixes cotton stuffing with her leaves, symbolizing her recognition of both parts of herself: her origin in Dream Town and her equally important experience growing up in Halloween Town. It took the combination of both those parts of herself to defeat the Sandman.
Doors into Other Worlds
Fairy tales and fantasy often use the motif of a magical door between worlds to transport the protagonist into the magical world of the story’s quest. There must be some means for the protagonist to step from one to the other where the laws of reality are too different to overlap with those of the ordinary world,
Symbolically, doors represent both challenge and opportunity. By stepping over the threshold, the protagonist signals acceptance of the task ahead. At first, Jack must coax Sally across the threshold of the door into Valentine Town, but that allows Sally to learn about herself when she meets Queen Ruby Valentino, the embodiment of the kind of queen Sally feels she ought to be. Later, the door to Dream Town allows her to learn where she came from, and from there, she uses the door in the library to see Queen Elizabeth in the human world, which influences her as she further adjusts to the idea of being a queen.
Doors can also represent new beginnings. For Sally, returning to the world of her birth allows her to go back to her lost childhood and discover who she was before she was stolen. Because of this, Sally can go forward, basing her choices on a foundation of self-knowledge, choosing the direction she wants to go and the person she wants to be.
Cultural Differences
The author plays with the motif of cultural differences, showing how people’s environment shapes their assumptions and perceptions. In the original movie, when Jack describes the wonder and magic of Christmas, he and the other people of Halloween Town don’t quite get it. They impose their own preconceptions and way of thinking on the other holiday, supplying Jack’s sleigh with skeletal reindeer and giving children shrunken heads as gifts.
In Halloween Town, a wilted, poisonous flower promises the blessing of a long, dreadful life, and Sally thinks that poison nightshade is a reasonable thing to bring on a honeymoon. When Jack tells Sally she won’t need potions or poisons in the other holiday worlds, Sally cannot imagine what such a world would be like.
Mere exposure to different worlds changes Sally’s way of thinking. She thinks of Queen Ruby in terms of flowers rather than bugs and snakes. St. Patrick’s Town teaches Sally to think outside the established paths that ultimately lead nowhere except back to their starting point. The people of Dream Town think about sleep differently from how Sally has learned to in Halloween Town. To discover the trick to defeating the Sandman, Sally must combine what she has learned from the other holiday worlds to think outside the established rules and combine two different ways of thinking about sleep—as both a blessing and a condition that can be brought on by poison.
Much of the humor of the original movie relies on the incongruity between Halloween and Christmas, which emphasize opposite qualities. The drama of Long Live the Pumpkin Queen arises from a similar incongruity. Incorporating very different perspectives can be uncomfortable, but Sally becomes a stronger and wiser person as a result.
