Where the Wild Things Are

Things Are’, in which a mischievous child Max is transported to a land of anarchic monsters, would seem more suited to a half-hour Raymond Briggs-style animation than a feature length film. Director Spike Jonez, working from a screenplay co-written with writer Dave Eggers, who has already explored the travails of childhood in his memoir ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, opens the narrative out to take in nine-year-old Max’s home life and to illustrate how his encounters with the monsters help broaden his understanding of the grownup world and his own. In a wonderfully vivid opening sequence Max (an impressively naturalistic Max Records) initiates a snowball fight with some older children which results in his treasured, newly-constructed igloo being destroyed. Jonez here perfectly captures the sense of immediacy and emotional intensity of childhood. Later Max throws a tantrum when his mother (Keener), who is busy chatting with her new boyfriend, fails to acknowledge him, and runs off into the forest. He finds an abandoned boat and sets sail. In the morning Max arrives at an island where he encounters a raucous band of monsters. Using his cunning he manages to establish himself king and promises to make all the beasts happy. But Max’s rule is uneasy and the danger of him being eaten, or of getting on the wrong side of the huge sulky and petulant monster Carol (Gandolfini no stranger to playing big beasts with psychological problems) is ever present. Coming as it does from the almost painfully hip combination of Jonez and Eggers, as well as featuring a score from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ frontwoman and style mag queen Karen O (Wes Anderson probably made the tea on set too), the picture feels surprisingly free of archness and narrative high jinx, with Jonez playing it agreeably straight and sincere. The sun-dappled photography and rustic production design are suitably otherworldly and the monsters ‘performances’, created through a combination of performers in suits, puppetry and CGI tweaking for facial expressions, topped off with a voiceover from the top-notch cast, are wonderfully realised. The continuous exposure to these sulky monsters makes the picture at times feel like an episode of H.R. Pufnstuf (ask your granddad) after a child therapy session, but this remains a bold and curiously believable depiction of childhood that, like the source material, refuses to talk down to its young audience.

< Back | View Archive