Where the Wild Things Are

Director: Spike Jonze
Cast: Paul Dano, Mark Ruffalo, James Gandolfini, Catherine Keener, Forest Whitaker
Release date: 16 Oct, 2009
Genre: Fantasy

Director Spike Jonze has embarked on the mission to adapt Maurice Sendak's famous children visual book, “Wild Things”, into a movie that is not just for children or with children, but also for adults  being kids again. So as Halloween is just around the corner, peeking at us with its black and thrilling cape of ghosts and candy, we're dedicating this week's movie to all children out there waiting for the spooky holiday.

While most children movies are warm colored, happy heroes Walt Disney type, Jonze's adaptation brings an edgy fantastic world to reality. You really can feel the distress the main character is feeling when confronted with his own emotions. No wonder that in the case of Maurice Sendak's book of only 10 sentences, it took publishers a year to accept the raw characters that children seem to peek at every time they went in a book store...

Jonze managed not to compromise the book, so his movie included the atmosphere and world Sendak had envisioned, by using fantasy imagery to bring to life children's hidden troubling thoughts. The story revolved around Max (Max Records) , a ten year old boy who lives with his single mom (Catherine Keener) and resents her new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo). Feeling marginalized, Max doesn't have any friends, wither, his sister and her friends quite torment him. When he gives in to his “wild” side, he puts on a fuzzy wolf costume and howls at his mother in the middle of the night, afterwards storming out the door.

His typical rich imagination kicks in, so he embarks on a little boat that takes him to an isolated island inhabited by giant fuzzy monsters. The type with horns and a bad temper. The type that have a lot of fun. :) Here, he is crowned king and is accepted as a part of their little weird society which basically has no rules, except to smash something and give everybody else a hard time every now and then. He builds a strong friendship with Carol (voice by James Gandolfini). Carol is upset with KW (Lauren Ambrose) that she pays more attention to her owls than to him (remember Max's sister?). Alexander (Paul Dano) is depressed because no one seems to listen to him. Judith (Catherine O'Hara) is simply grumpy all the time. Every monster depicts one of Max's problems and he has to adapt them to each other so they can live in harmony which is soon proven to be an impossible task. In the end, Max has to realize that simply doing your best in an imperfect situation is by far the best solution there is to the world.

Spike Jonze improvised in creating the monsters characters and he did a wonderful job. Somehow, if he had made everything in CG, we definitely could have observed a distance between Max and the monsters and it would have seemed fake. But otherwise, the director used a mix of people in costumes, puppets and CGI, and created a very realistic portrayal of the Wild Things. Facial expressions were enhanced by computers making them look almost human like. Colors are reduced to a minimum, just with shades of brown and gray, and the background music is composed of eccentric tunes courtesy of Yeah Yeah Yeah's member Karen O. I especially enjoyed the music that can be heard in the movie trailers. It's simply uplifting.

As a trivia fact, this movie was kept on Warner Bros. shelves for almost a year, in hope that Spike Jonze will decide to soften the characters and make the monsters more colorful and joyful. But thank God he didn't and that we get to enjoy this wonderful and true to the heart of children everywhere masterpiece of fantasy.

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