Ever since I first saw the teaser poster for Where the Wild Things Are, I was pumped to see Spike Jonze’s adaptation (no pun intended). The theatrical trailer blew me away as it teased the childhood adventure that I wanted to see on the big screen oh so very badly. It is with a heavy heart that I must admit Spike Jonze did not deliver a wonderfully crafted adventure for all ages. This movie is not the book that I remember falling asleep to in my small bed that harbored all of my monstrous fears. Instead, Where the Wild Things Are is an indie-movie masterpiece that takes an amazing adventure about being a child and dresses it up to be a snooty art house picture that very much has its own agenda of being artsy and message-ridden. This is truly a shame as the film shuts out every young child sitting in the theater and beats every other person in the room with symbol after symbol of the dangers of childhood.
Jonze’s film follows a young boy named Max (Max Records) who is a pretty daft kid with a deranged set of sensibilities. He has a wondrous imagination that mutilates his own thoughts, feelings, and family relationships. One night after being a complete douche to his mom (Catherine Keener), Max runs away and finds a boat which he uses to sail off into the distance. He leaves his homeland with only the wolf costume he has on and lands on a big mysterious island that is only lit by a giant fire within its trees. As Max lands on the island he befriends the wild monsters that inhabit the island. He is then crowned king of the island and seeks to rule with the intention to keep all the monsters together as a family. As you might guess, things do not stay peachy for long
YAY:
- The art style is the single best part of this film. The monsters look just like they are illustrated in Maurice Sendak’s book, yet they have the kind of heart only found in the creatures developed by Jim Henson in the 80′s. I really can not stress enough how appreciative I am that Jonze decided to go this route with the monsters of the Wild.
- The film is written very well, or better than about 70% of family films anyways. However, some of the content will be addressed in the NAY section below.
- Overall the cinematography is very spot-on. Jonze captures so much beauty within the Wild island, and it has so much to behold that the reality of its existence is something the viewer truly hopes for. However, the monumental achievement of this aspect of the film is the sequence involving Carol’s (James Gandolfini) model. It looks like a fairy land within a fairy land and it works very well.
NAY:
- This film is almost totally inaccessible to a child audience. Each of the wild things is presented more like a moody adult rather than child-like terrors that we see in Sendak’s book. It’s this combined with the fact that Max is a character that is pretty damn hard to relate to which makes it hard for kids to get into the movie. He reminds you of that weird kid in grade school who smelled like odor eaters and punches small animals simply because that’s how he plays. I don’t know where that applies to the movie overall, but the Max in the movie is absolutely not the Max that children bonded with in the book.
- There are too many messages in the movie. Every 20 minutes there is a new lesson to be learned or a new allegory for the audience to digest. I understand that this works for Jonze’s past indie wonders like Adaptation, but this is a kid’s movie about a phenomenal kid’s book. Everything does not need to be about rebirth, and anger, and the hardships of a child’s emotional development. Let the source material tell its story and then maybe some of the allegories already present within it can talk for themselves. I don’t need to be talked to by a film, that’s what education is for.
- Music is not a big factor in the development of movies but it does set the tone for many sequences in Where the Wild Things Are and I couldn’t stand it. Once again, Jonze transforms this source material into an indie-culture fanboy’s wet dream which is fine but not for this movie.
At the end of the day Where the Wild Things Are is a film more so to be appreciated rather then enjoyed. After reading the book when I was a kid, I felt less scared about the monsters which would haunt my dreams because the book brought them down to my level. The film version treats the book and its characters like they’re in a Woody Allen picture or a indie movie about the power of literary storytelling. This is all nice and dandy but the filmmakers forgot about the magic of the book which should unite the kid’s of old and new to smile about the fantastical lands of childhood imagination.
