Where the Wild Things Are

This was our movie night movie tonight, but I picked it just as much for myself as for my kids. I really loved the picture book when I was little (as well as many others by Maurice Sendak) and I was curious about what was added to make a feature-length film from it.

I must admit that I did not watch every minute of this movie, which is par for the course of movie night movies, but I'm sure I saw enough to get the gist of it. I must also admit that I had a slight preconceived bias against this movie ever since I heard that Dave Eggers was involved. (I read his book, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, several years ago and was not impressed. Whoever called Eggers the "J.D. Salinger of our generation" needs to be smacked upside the head. To me, one obvious difference between the two authors is that Holden Caulfield surely was not modeled after Salinger, while I was just sure that Eggers was the exact same sort of MTV-style loser as his two main characters. But I digress.)

I didn't like the change they made for the movie that has Max escaping from the house and running away. He was supposed to actually go to his room, not just be told to go there. They really missed an opportunity when they skipped showing the part about how in his room "a forest grew . . . and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and his walls became the world all around . . . " (that may not be an exact quote--I pulled that from memory--but it's close enough). Can you just imagine how cool it would have looked to see the trees and vines growing in his bedroom, and the walls melting away? Plus, I always loved the implication that the whole adventure had been a dream, and I didn't know how they could pull that off if he didn't fall asleep in his bedroom. (They didn't even try, by the way).

I love that the monsters looked just like the monsters in the book, but their voices were too advanced and their emotions were too human. They just don't sound monster-y enough. I couldn't help thinking that the voices were actually coming from the audience of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Not only that, but their movements were not graceful and natural enough. Their slow lumbering waddle made it too difficult to forget that I was watching people wearing monster suits. Even so, I can't express enough how impressed I was with the monster costumes in their faithfulness to the look of the original drawings.

Before he sailed away, Max evidently had some serious anger issues, combined with a distinct lack of self-control. I was sure hoping that his adventure with the Wild Things would solve that flaw in his personality, because I was afraid in a few months Max would start torturing neighborhood cats, and would eventually grow up to be a serial killer. Too bad the part of the movie where he returns home wasn't long enough to show us whether he retained any of the lessons he'd learned with the Wild Things.

If you are wondering whether the monsters would be frightening for children to watch, I'd say I think the scariest part was the doomsday lecture by Max's science teacher. On the other hand, there were a few times my three-year-old squealed and snuggled closer to me (and it wasn't during the lecture).

I feel like all I've done is complain about the movie, but it really wasn't bad. Not necessarily something I'd want to watch over and over again (once was probably enough), and my kids were not interested in watching it again before I return the disk to netflix, but I'd say it's worth seeing once.

I will leave you with my favorite quote from the movie: "Forget it. I'm not going to step on your head just to make you feel better."