Where The Wild Things Are

Spike Jonze's movies always leave a strange, lingering feeling after first viewing. When I first saw his film "Being John Malkovich", I thought the film was weird and the ending sucked because it seemed open-ended. If you've seen "Adaptation", chances are that you didn't "get it" the first time like I did when I first saw it, plus you didn't like it because of how ambivalent the film is.

And then came his latest work "Where The Wild Things Are", a movie-adaptation of Maurice Sendak's illustrated children book of the same name. Having seen the movie first and then read the book, I must say that the film is indeed a faithful adaptation of Sendak's book. The story remains the same, where the lead protagonist, a young playful boy named Max goes on a "journey" into the wilderness and encounters cute but gigantic, furry monster-like creatures, or "wild things" and decides to become their ruler and king. Basically all the characters in the movie adaptation remains faithful to the book, where their appearance would look similar if they would to exist in real life.

Being a children's book, "Wild Things" doesn't really make much sense to me when I read through it. As compared to the movie, Spike Jonze has certainly taken much effort to inject more emotion and depth into Max and the creature characters - the Wild Things talk, yell, being playful and throwing tandrums like children, unlike in the book, in which they seem like mere arbitrary, giant, furry, monsters with horns on their heads and claws on their hands. In the film, each wild thing has their own name too.

As the film is a live-action adaptation of Sendak's illustrated book, certain segments of the film seems to dive right into the implausible (a young boy ran out of his house in the middle of the night, finds an abandoned sail along the river, and sets off to an island far far away), but they seem to be deliberately overlooked to hint that the world inhabited by the wild things is the realm of Max's imagination.

The behaviour and characters of the individual "wild things" also seem to derive from Max's experience of the people he met in his life (which was only briefly foretold in the film, such as how Max is being punished by his single mum, neglected by his sister and so on). They seem to embody attributes such as the temperamental, the impatient, the fun-loving, or the frivolous. Such characterizations layer the film with more subtleties, which enriches the viewing experience on top of what's merely portrayed on screen. Which is why I think "Where The Wild Things Are" deserves appraisal more than my first impression upon viewing it, because it has layered meanings beneath all the cute characters, their wild rumpuses and their playfulness. It is a beautiful film which makes for great repeat viewings.