Where the Wild Things Are

Editorial

Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are is a masterpiece among bedtime-story books. It's simultaneously a cliche and an error to describe any book, even one so beloved, as being "unfilmable" but any director approaching this material was in danger of either treading with such care as to render their adaptation flimsy and irrelevant, or of imposing elaborations with such rigour they'd have run the risk of alienating the millions of Sendak fans. But this long, long-awaited movie confirms that Spike Jonze trod with sufficient tact between those two extremes.

Because Wild Things is not an actioner. Nor, in the conventional sense, is it an adventure picture. In fact, it's not even really a children's film. And, while there's astounding VFX in most scenes, you won't even notice it's there.

Jonze has embraced Sendak's story so tightly he's absorbed it entirely, then reproduced it as a personalised chamber-piece, his own genetic material indistinguishable from that of Sendak's Thus the boy, played with uncanny naturalism by new discovery Max Records, becomes the product of a broken marriage, standing on the verge of adolescence. He's afraid to jump, as if childhood itself is protecting him from the world. And so he creates the Wild Things.

As conjured by Jonze and Eggers, Sendak's iconic creatures are reconceptualised as a gang of kids consumed and directed by child politics. It doesn't take Freud to spot that, to some extent, they each represent aspects of Max's personality at a time when he's slowly starting to realise the universe does not revolve around him. But this symbolism never swamps the emotion, thanks firstly to great work on the part of the voice cast, and secondly to a knockout combination of Jim Henson Company costuming and digital face work.

Dan Jolin