Where the Wild Things Are: A Movie Review

"Let the wild rumpus start!" Where the Wild Things Are, a much anticipated movie release, came to the theaters last Friday. I was curious how Spike Jonze would make a full-length movie out of the well-loved children's classic book. The book consists of 37 pages of wonderful illustrations and 338 words of text. Only imagination could turn that into a full-length movie. But what kind of story did they make on the screen? Was it a hit or a miss?

The two largest mistakes the movie made were setting it in such a dark tone, one that I hesitate to take small children to. This is disappointing considering the book, Where the Wild Things Are, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, was aimed at young children.

The other thing that took the movie on the wrong turn was instead of having Max going to his room and disappearing into a magic land of imagination and wonder, he runs away from home. That felt totally wrong. It changed the story immediately.

The small bits of extra violence were unnecessary to establish the fact that Max was acting out and angry, misbehaving. It was overkill. The temper tantrums would have been enough to build on his angry outbursts.

Showing a bunch of young kids a child who is way past the teething age, biting his mother, did not set the tone well, it made me look at my girlfriend and daughter in the theater and whisper,"Oh yeah, that will go over big with parents. I can see kids pretending this movie and doing that." They agreed.

Finding King Max's crown in a pile with human skeletons was not necessary either. For a small child some of this movie might be frightening and not just exciting.

The dirt clod fight was another scene that left me wondering which audience this movie was actually made for. Max and the Wild Things were not only fighting, they were trying to hurt each other. An impressionable child may see that and think, " Hey, this looks like fun!"

In the book, Max's initial acting out was chasing the dog with a fork, but not getting him and hammering a line to the wall in order to create a play tent. The illustrations and those few actions were enough to set the scene and establish the need to send Max to his room for bad behavior.

Obviously to create the movie there had to be more added to the story than that to draw it out. But It went about it in an odd way.

The movie started in angry tone with older kids bullying Max and destroying his igloo that was created when a snowplow pushed a huge pile of snow to the opposite side of the street. Max, in anger goes into his sister's room and destroys a valentine he made for her that she had displayed there. Then he acts out to his mother, which fit the feel of the book more.

They did establish a bond between Max and his mom that was sweet with his mom typing Max's imaginative vampire story into her computer while he told it. The mother and son love and bond was obviously there.

The darkness is also expressed in the sadness in his mother's face. In the movie version the father is not there. The mother is dating and the movie seems to insinuate that part of Max's anger is at the unmentioned and unknown father. It certainly makes it seem as if the mother can't cope completely with her children.

The book had quite the opposite feel for me even though no father is mentioned. Mom was in charge and Max had to go to his room for how he misbehaved.

It took a while to build to the adventure but the beginning felt scattered and slow to me. I was waiting for it to pick up and move along at a faster pace, waiting for the story to begin. It felt unfinished to me as if they weren't quite sure how to start the movie off

They did an absolutely beautiful job with the costumes and special effects surrounding the ceatures. Using Sendak's illustrations as the cue, the Wild Things looked very much like the illustrations. The Wild Things were brought to bigger than life movie reality in a way that made them both very real and fitting the original story.

I loved the scene where they run to the cliff edge and howl. (The three of us went outside after the movie was over and howled too. It was fun.) I also loved the houses they liked the creative houses they lived in and the grand creation the group built under Max's royal leadership.

In my mind's eye, I was expecting some amazing special effects turning Max's room into another world, morphing from one world to another. With the movie technology available now, they could have done that. They failed miserably. They touched on his imagination when he built a tent in his room, but instead of using that to create an amazing visual transformation of the room to the sea and the magical land where Wild Things roamed free, they had Max run away, take a boat and find the island. It felt like the cheap way to make the story happen. I felt cheated.

There was humour scattered here and there throughout the movie that got the audience chuckling. I found myself sitting there with a big smile on my face at various points of the movie. But it did the opposite for me too at other parts of the movie when I felt like I was tilting my head in a puzzled way saying, " What made them do it that?"

Where the Wild Things Are is a simple, magical book. It illustrates a child's anger and offers a creative way to deal with it, escaping into imagination. I distinctly remember times as a child myself when I was sent to or escaped to my room and creating many different worlds up there in my room, getting completely and magically lost in them and then finding my own way back.

In the book, Max went to a world in and beyond his bedroom and sailed away to the land of the Wild Things, where he became king and they all listened to him. He was gone for a couple years but returned "into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot."

The book is charming, rich in imagination and adventure. The movie missed the charm and magic, although it still had adventure and feeling and the Wild things were wonderfully portrayed.

They did a nice job showing the bonding between Max and Carol and the other Wild Things and the interpersonal play between all of them. It also showed the inner growth Max experienced when he realized that things don't really work out perfectly when you are king and in charge.

I wanted so much to love this movie. I went into the theater with anticipation, wanting to feel the magic of the story. I loved the book. Instead, throughout the movie I vacillated between loving parts and shaking my head, thinking, No, I don't like how they interpreted and portrayed this.

I would like to watch it again just to see what I feel a second time, but I will wait until it comes out on DVD. Over all I would give it a 6 or 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. It left me both pleased and disappointed. Where The Wild Things Are felt not quite right, but real at the same time. It was too dark in tone and missing the childlike magic feel of the story, but it had fun and creative parts.