Where the Wild Things Are

A writer of few words,Maurice Sendak sketched an imaginative world in 10 sentences for his 1963children’s classic, Where the Wild ThingsAre. Because of its brevity, the storybook probably struck almost no one asfeature film material, except perhaps the director who finally filmed it, SpikeJonze (Adaptation). Along withconsiderably expanding on Sendak’s elliptical story and establishingpersonalities for the anonymous wild things, Jonze’s version has the courage torun against all current directions in Hollywoodchildren’s movies. There are no farting animals to amuse the kids, nopop-culture references for the parents, and the moral of the story is shownwith subtlety, not highlighted in bright magic marker.

In Jonze’s oddlypoignant, live action retelling, the wolf-suited protagonist Max is given afuller back-story than in the book. His careworn single mom (Catherine Keener)clings to the threads of her career and is lonely for adult companionship.Played with a believable combination of impishness, selfishness and conscienceby newcomer Max Records, Max is a familiar figure as the child who, afraid ofbeing overlooked or unloved, acts up. Jonze enters the mind of the 9-year-oldcharacter, not only through the familiar device of keeping the camera at akid’s-eye level but also by hurling along in the careening bumper car of Max’semotions and the power of an imagination as yet un-neutered by conventionalreality.

After spoiling mom’sdate through bad behavior, Max runs into the night from their house to thenearby woods, where he sets forth in a boat of dreams toward an uncertainshore. After arriving in the land of the wild things, he saves himself frombeing eaten by convincing the creatures to crown him as their king. But thepolitics of this land, he will learn, is no easier than the politics of anyfamily, community or nation.

Although indifferentlypaced, Jonze’s film shines in its visual depiction of the furry, feathered,horned and clawed wild things. Instead of relying on computer animation, Jonzeconstructed them from puppet suits whose animatronic heads spookily mimic theexpressions of the actors voicing the characters, including James Gandolfini,Lauren Ambrose and Paul Dano. The creatures are selfish and destructive yet notmalevolent, capable both of caring and harm. Their emotional turbulence, whichmight represent magnified fragments of Max’s own personality, allow him to seehimself in the fractured mirror of their squabbling, rather sad lives.

Jonze was the firstfilmmaker to turn Where the WildThings Are into a full-length movie, butnot the first to try out Sendak’s story. A 1973 animated version has beenreleased, along with a handful of the author’s lesser-known tales, in a DVDcalled Where the Wild Things Are…And 5More Stories by Maurice Sendak. Clocking in at only eight minutes, theearlier rendition adheres to the book, setting the original illustrations inmotion with the accompaniment of an excitable recitation of the words plusmusic by Peter Schickele (aka P.D.Q. Bach).