How does someone take 10 sentences of text and flesh it out into a successful two-hour movie?
The answer lies in the exceptional film "Where the Wild Things Are," an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's short children's story, directed by Spike Jonze.
Jonze's job was to take Sendak's beloved story, which, unlike many children's tales, is a surprisingly unsentimental look at the life of one very wild boy and create a touching film that both the young and old could enjoy.
Max (played effortlessly by Max Records) is a boisterous young boy who feels left behind as his mother moves on to a new boyfriend and his older sister pays more attention to her friends than her brother. Instead of working through his feelings, Max releases them with his imagination, dressing in a wolf costume, demanding in a beastly voice that his mother (Catherine Keener) feed him and biting her when she refuses to give in to his wild demands.
Max runs away and finds himself in a land of "Wild Things," a tribe of eclectic monsters looking for a leader to keep them a family. The most prominent Wild Thing, Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), immediately takes a liking to Max for his restless energy and playfulness. Carol is devastated that his crush, KW (Lauren Ambrose), has tired of her monster friends and spends time on her own, and he believes Max can be the king - the uniting force to keep his family together.
Jonze took special care to make Max's wild world appear as real as possible. The camerawork is like that of a documentary - the shots are grainy and the movement seems like the camera is following Max's every animalistic move through his "kingdom." Instead of taking the animation route for the Wild Things, Jonze had each of the actors wear 9-foot costumes so the monsters were actually present during filming. Computer animation was only used to add facial expressions.
The soundtrack, created by Karen O (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and the Kids added more of an untamed element to the story. A lot of the songs featured chanting and wolf-howling. The music in general sounded like the result of a bunch of rowdy children getting together to play cowboys and Indians - but it worked.
The story may have taken a less traditional route than Sendak's original tale, but Max's journey to the Wild Things and back is an exciting and vivid return to childhood memories and the unrelenting creative forces of imagination.
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