Where The Wild Things Are

This is Spike Jonze’s third directorial gig. His previous films Adaptation and Being John Malkovitch are cult favourites and are very much adult tales, so it is interesting that here he takes a much-loved children’s picture book for his subject matter. However, Where The Wild Things Are is not a children’s movie but rather a movie about childhood. In fact adults, particularly those who revelled in Maurice Sendak’s book, published in 1963, will get the most out of this film. The original book has barely more than a dozen pages of story but here the characters and plot have been vastly expanded, with the advice and approval of Sendak who has acted as a producer.

The film really gets inside Max’s head – what it is like to be 9 years old, feel really angry, and generally be unable to control that anger as well as other disruptive emotions. In his role as king, Max discovers that his subjects display a whole range of other conflicting and puzzling emotions – love, fear, jealousy, possessiveness and so on. Learning to negotiate relationships with the Wild Things is like learning to deal with his own inner world and coming to acknowledge the emotions of the adults around him.

Technically this film is a winner. These days we are so used to elaborate CGI artifice it is almost a shock to discover creatures, created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, that are in essence a mix of huge state-of-the-art puppets, blended with computer animation, and a heap of live action – namely people running around inside the huge hairy suits. The very expressive faces and eyes of the Wild Things have been digitally worked on later and there is much fine detail to be admired.

The actors voicing the Wild Things give each a marvellously distinctive personality. James Gandolfini is Carol, leader of the pack, and the Wild Thing who gets closest to Max, and who also displays the same levels of anger Max has, destroying his own creations in his outbursts. Chris Cooper is an amiable rooster called Douglas, Lauren Ambrose is KW, an outsider-type woman, Catherine O’Hara is the sarcastic and confusing Judith, whose husband Ira (Forrest Whitaker) is in charge of punching holes in trees. Lastly, the goat-horned Alexandra, (Paul Dano) feels, like Max, that he is never heard by others. The small roles of the real humans are, as one would expect, expertly handled by Mark Ruffalo as the boyfriend and the ever-reliable Catherine Keener as Mom.

In another coup for the Australian film industry, much of the filming was done in Victoria, notably the live action scenes in burned-out forests and a lot of incredible stunt work done with wires, pulleys and rigging.

At times the tendency to too much schmaltz is there, taking off a little of the film’s edge, and perhaps a 10-minute prune in the editing suite would have made it pack a more powerful punch but with a delightfully indirect approach to issues like alienation, loneliness and self-esteem Where The Wild Things Are will surely get its message through in a highly entertaining and effective way.

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