“Let the wild rumpus start!” Max, newly declared king of the wild things, shouts as his first order of business.
He has sailed across a vast ocean to where the wild things are, to the place where only the things he wants to happen actually do, but he has unknowingly arrived at the place where he will confront others’ emotions, that are as unsettling to him as the ones he tried to leave behind.
Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 childhood classic, Where the Wild Things Are, asks viewers to reflect on two things: the experience of growing up as an emotionally turbulent time, and it never gets any easier no matter where you run.
Co-written by David Eggers and Jonze, the film is not an interpretation nor a direct representation of Sendak’s original content. The film expands on the story of a mischievous boy, clad in his famous wolf-suit pajamas, longing for a place full of adventure, freedom and friendship.
Max’s character is quickly introduced and defined within the first 20 minutes of the film through a series of both unruly and touching encounters. Placing him in a single-parent home with an apathetic sister, his character is that of a rambunctious boy suffering from the painful tinge of childhood loneliness and the emotional confusion of the pre-adolescent mind.
Subsequent to an altercation with his mother, in which he shouts, “Woman! Feed me!” from the countertop, Max runs off into the night to find the sail boat that sets him off on his great adventure.
While the simply written and illustrated book demands the child audience imagine such things as Max sailing through the night and day and the fantastic physical construction of the wild things, or their demeanor as they roar and gnash their terrible teeth, Jonze’s expansion delivers all of those imaginings in the screen version at the grandest capacity.
Shot on an $80 million budget, the execution of every detail of the character’s traits and the aesthetically pleasing settings make the film a truly great accomplishment and enjoyable to watch.
Sendak’s wild things are a broad embodiment of the spectrum of childhood emotion. Egger and Jonze’s wild things each have a name and sentiment that inherently mirrors the same feelings Max is trying to escape.
The two most influential wild things are Carol and KW. Carol is quick to grow emotionally distressed and experience fits of anger. He seeks to be pacified by a never-ending state of happiness among the wild things, relying on Max to do the job. KW is the wild thing that seeks comfort in faraway friends, removed from the circle of the wild things. Max’s interactions and attempts to appease both Carol and KW, as well as the rest of the wild things, leads him to a breaking point. He confronts all of their internal problems as parallel to his own, which instigates his decision to return home.
Max’s departure from the wild things is surely the most captivating and touching of all. Standing in his sailboat at the water’s edge, he searches the horizon one last time for a sign of the broken Carol, coming to say his goodbyes to the only king the wild things claim to never have eaten.
As KW tenderly whispers to Max Sendak’s famous line, “Oh, please don’t go. We’ll eat you up. We love you so,” she pushes his sailboat off. Carol runs, tear-stricken, to find his young friend. Arriving seconds too late, he leads the wild things in a howling frenzy, turning Max’s tearful and sullen face into a smile of appreciation for what the wild things have given him: a better understanding of himself.
The Karen O and The Kids 14-song, original soundtrack helps viewers transition between scenes and absorb the high visual quality of each.
Released Oct. 16, the film brought in $32.5 million at the box office opening weekend, taking the top spot. Perhaps the anticipation of the film, combined with general adoration for the popular children’s book, drew the audience composed of both adults and children to the theater. While the PG film is about a child caught up in pre-adolescent turbulence, it is not necessarily a children’s movie.
Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are puts the audience in a difficult position to determine their personal feelings toward the movie. Viewers must decide if Jonze’s film expansion is complementary to Sendak’s book, or if it should graciously, yet deservedly, stand on its own as a successful, artistically immaculate film.
Captured in the words of The Arcade Fire song “Wake Up,” used in the film’s official trailer, is the lesson Max learns from his time with the wild things, which everyone eventually learns. “If the children don’t grow up, our bodies get bigger, but our hearts get torn up.”
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