Jack Skellington’s debut in Disney Infinity has been a big hit. WIRED caught up with the game’s creators to learn about the process of bringing the 20-year-old character to the game. Image courtesy Disney
Twenty years after the release of Tim Burton’s legendary stop-motion animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas, its popular protagonist Jack Skellington lives on — this time in Disney’s $100 million virtual toybox Disney Infinity.
Jack Skellington’s Infinity figurine — available in GameStop stores now and everywhere else October 29 — unlocks the Pumpkin King himself as a playable character in the Infinity Toy Box mode, as well as a new challenge level called “Jack’s Nightmare.”
WIRED recently caught up with Disney Infinity executive producer John Vignocchi and art director Jeff Bunker to learn more about the process of adapting Burton’s iconic character.
In order to make Skellington fit into Infinity’s game world, Bunker says, the team had to figure out how to redesign him using the game’s glossy, action-figure art style.
Most of the characters in Infinity are made short and thick, he says, because they’re meant to look a little more like rough-and-tumble toys. The challenge presented by adapting Skellington was that his lanky skeletal frame is the very antithesis of short and thick.
As with every character added to Infinity, the team worked directly with the character’s original creator to make sure that their work was true to form. Bunker and Vignocchi agreed that Tim Burton made this part of the process smoother with his easygoing style.
“Tim was an absolute pleasure to work with,” says Vignocchi. “When you’re making the original creator of that character happy, you’re going to make the fans happy.”
Disney tinkered with making Skellington shorter for his Infinity debut, but ultimately decided to stick more closely to his original, lanky proportions. Image courtesy Disney
“It’s a huge challenge, but it’s very satisfying that all those filmmakers appreciate what we’re doing and feel like we’re doing them justice,” Bunker says.
Vignocchi says that the team knew that Skellington was a popular character, but were taken aback by the strong response to his inclusion in Infinity. When Disney first revealed Skellington alongside a big batch of other new Infinity characters at the D23 Expo in August, it was Skellington that got the most applause and cheers from the audience.
Bunker says that Burton’s distinct art style is a big part of the reason that Skellington has remained a popular and relevant character for all these years.
“I think [Burton]‘s art style is so attractive because it appeals to the nonconformist or the quirkiness that all of us have a little bit of,” Bunker says. “It’s just a little bit off center. There’s a lot of people who feel like they’re not in the mainstream, and they identify with that.”
Disney tells WIRED that since its release, the $13 Jack Skellington figure has already become one of the most popular Infinity toys. Vignocchi says that when he went out to buy an extra figurine for himself, he couldn’t find it.
“I asked about it at GameStop,” he said, “and the clerk just responded: ‘did you pre-order?’”
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