Where the Wild Things Are
Children’s books are deceptively simplistic. The best of them contain within a very short and uncomplicated space, a depth of meaning that can appeal both to the child and the adult who still remembers being a child. One such book is Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, later adapted into a fascinating film from director Spike Jonze.
Sendak’s short and sweet picture book features a young boy named Max who dresses up as a wolf and runs rampant in his household, much to his mother’s dismay. After being sent to his room, Max falls asleep and awakens to find himself on a jungle island populated by the Wild Things. He’s eventually hailed as a king and cuts loose with a “wild rumpus” with his new subjects, but finally decides he has to return home to his family, where a hot supper awaits him. The book comes in at just over 300 words, and most children who grew up reading it probably remember the pictures and the phrase “let the wild rumpus start!” more than anything else.
Spike Jonze took the book and ran with it, stretching the scant narrative into a full film about anger and loneliness. It roughly follows the plot of the book, as Max turns into a king of the Wild Things, but veers off into unknown territory as his relationship with the complex family unit of the Wild Things intensifies. Loyal to Sendak’s drawings, the Wild Things are live action versions of the book’s famous images, but their personalities are expanded upon, expressing Max’s desire for family and friendship, and also his anger, resentment, and loneliness. It is a curious and melancholic film, not particularly aimed at children, but rather at the adults who remember, perhaps all too well, the pain of being a child.
As an adaptation, Where The Wild Things Are maintains Sendak’s deeper psychoanalytic understanding of child (and adult) mentality, but in fleshing out some of the characters and their “wildness” the film risks overdoing it. While Sendak’s work does much with very little, Jonze’s film is slightly overinflated, complicating the relationships among the Wild Things while failing to take into account the anarchic joy that is a major facet of the book. Unlike Sendak’s book, which is about children and for children, the film is really about children but for adults.
