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Where The Wild Things Are Review

It’s not often that an ostensible children’s film receives as much attention from the critical community as has ‘Where The Wild Things Are’, but then the adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s beloved storybook is the kind of movie that only comes around once in a very long while: a family picture that is also a bona fide work of art, as essential viewing for adults as kids, yielding riches galore for every potential audience. Its narrative is deceptively simple, following troubled seven-year old Max as he escapes from the pains of his family life into a fantastical world populated by gigantic furry monsters who crown him their king, only to discover that this alternate existence is not protected from the same anxieties that confront Max back home. 

 

The signs were always auspicious that this project would produce something special, from the singular beauty of the source text to the creative talent hired to realise it onscreen. Employing Spike Jonze, a director most famous for his background in bizarre 90’s music videos and the superb ‘Being John Malkovich’, was a risky move, but it has paid dividends. With a story so slight in its original form, someone with an expansive imagination was obviously needed to fill in the narrative and visual gaps, and Jonze succeeds admirably on both accounts. His accomplishment is fully evident in the exquisite design of the film. Take the island where it plays out, an inspired mix of the familiar and the surreal, with shots of woodland canopies giving way to desert vistas home to a shaggy dog hundreds of feet tall. It is this combination of the everyday and the otherworldly that perfectly encapsulates the wide-eyed wonder of childhood, where the world is not yet wholly mundane, but still capable of being an alien and extraordinary place to an inquisitive young mind.

 

The wild things are even more impressive, brought to life through a seamless blend of animatronics, CGI and good old-fashioned men-in-suits waddling about, which gives the beastly co-stars a physical presence that enhances both their magic and their danger.

 

And make no mistake, there is a very pronounced element of darkness to both the creatures and the film as a whole that is pleasingly reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s great children’s films from the eighties like ‘Time Bandits’ and ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’. The script is to be applauded for being one of the most unsentimentally accurate depictions of the childhood psyche that this reviewer has seen. It evokes not only the joyful abandon of childhood games, but also the acute sensation of betrayal that can sour one’s family relationships at that age, and the horrified fascination with death and the inevitable end of everything that I can recall fretting about myself. ‘We’re big guys,’ one of the creatures answers Max when the boy asks him if he knows that the Sun will someday die, ‘we don’t have to worry about little things like the Sun.’ Yet it is said with so little conviction that we are made to recognise that this fantasy world doesn’t hold the solution to Max’s problems. That it cannot hide him from the threats posed by reality.

 

In fact, the overwhelming impression that I came away from the film with was that it is essentially, even surprisingly, sad. Indeed, at points I thought the melancholic tone was a little too overbearing, the bickering, weeping and existential crises of the wild things becoming so frequent that it is possible to imagine this film as being what Ingmar Bergman might have produced had he ever made a children’s film. But for much of its running time it is also utterly enchanting, balancing sequences of visceral energy such as a ground-shaking dirt clod fight with moments of heartbreaking poignancy. ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ might not prove to be to everyone’s taste, but its idiosyncratic personality and edgy subject matter ought to recommend it to those after an antidote to the bland family flicks usually offered up at this time of year.

 

  

4 stars               

 

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