When I explain cultural misappropriation to children, I use the example of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
It’s effective because especially for children, who don’t have enough historical context to understand much of the concept, you can still fully grasp the idea.
There was nothing wrong with Jack seeing the beauty and differences in Christmas town, it’s when he tried to take what is unique about Christmas town away from those it originally belonged to without understanding the full context of Christmas things is when everything went wrong.
When Jack tries to get the folk of Halloween town to make Christmas gifts for children, etc., children understand that the Halloween town folk do not have the full context for the objects they are making, and they are able to see that the direct repercussions and consequences are very harmful.
what i like about this is the implication that if jack had taken the time to understand christmas town, bringing christmas to halloween town would not have been harmful. that’s how it works, folks. cultural sharing is GOOD, it’s only misappropriation when it’s done in ignorance and disrespect.
So it’s not just accidentally removing things form their context; he has intentionally disregard the meaning of the rituals he purports to be recreating, making them more fun for the recreaters but not like what the rituals are supposed to be and without the related significance.
This is the best way to conceptualize the wrong way to share culture I have ever seen and I think I finally get where people are coming from when they talk about “cultural appropriation.”
I mean think about it. They stopped working together after Nightmare Before Christmas. Tim Selfinserton is known for really connecting to his characters; and for Nightmare, Danny insisted on being Jack because he saw so much of himself in him. Considering that Tim kept putting off writing the script (and then ended up not doing it lmao) and for some time the only words on paper were Danny’s songs, and parts of the film were shot before there even was a script. The fact that Tim wasn’t directing and the “script” they were using was Danny’s (who Tim didn’t respect) must’ve been a blow to his ego. Tim’s characters are him, he couldn’t handle Danny’s control over Jack who he (Danny) also saw as an extension of himself. You can see that in the film, as Jack isn’t the typical Burton protagonist, most notably in the scene where he realizes he was wrong and goes and fixes his mistake instead of whining about how no one gets his art and running away. So they didn’t speak for three years because they were doubles of Jack Skellington.
just moving along like everyone else 