A classic by all accounts, and an unimprovable symbiosis of content and form, Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book Where the Wild Things Are ranks high among “Oh no they didn’t” fodder for movie adaptation. But Dave Eggers co-writing the film with director Spike Jonze makes a difference. That seems like reason enough to revisit Sendak’s ten indelibly illustrated sentences about a naughty kid on a tantrum trip to a monster-populated foreign land.
Sendak starts his young mischief-maker Max in a home-base bedroom whose atmosphere seems more restive than rest-inducing — like Van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles, with its theatrical perspective uneasily encouraging the expectation of enchantment. Much magic comes from seeing that space dissolved into a forest and later restored, post-tantrum, for an affecting yet unsentimental homecoming. Who in the world could cinematize that, we asked ourselves, if not Eggers and Jonze?

Oh no. They didn’t. Instead they made the place their own, filling the boy’s room and indeed the whole film with vaguely ingratiating signifiers of DIY creative intensity. None of Max’s toys or attitudes appear to be mass-produced, and eventually he comes to inhabit not a Sendak tableau or even a Van Gogh but something like an enormous communal Andy Goldsworthy earthwork. The aesthetic priorities are easy to appreciate, but they exacerbate an attenuating nostalgia. To properly showcase some wonderfully Muppety costumes from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, Where the Wild Things Are subordinates CGI effects to the retro-righteous aura of handicraft and lo-fi photorealism: Production designer K.K. Barrett and cinematographer Lance Acord supply an array of dusky hues familiar from the downbeat early-70s pop culture into which Eggers and Jonze were born. It is somehow intrusively pretty.
A thrasher in his early years and a Jackass creator later on, Jonze brings rambunctious agility to the proceedings, with Eggers providing characteristic tenderness and rumination on the fragility of companionship. Many feelings are expressed through leaping and smashing, and the denominator of social interaction is the pile-on, both cozy and smothering.