Where the Wild Things Are has to be the biggest ‘buzz’ children’s film release of the decade. This is unsurprising really considering the creative talent behind it (a selection of the coolest kids in the MTV playground; Spike Jonze, Karen O, Lance Acord, K.K. Barrett) and the script being based on the much loved children’s book from the 1960′s.
The roster of creative legends involved, a tantalisingly teased and addictive soundtrack, and a wave of highly desirable merchandise has got a lot of people’s knickers in a twist; as was obvious by the handful of crazed journos I saw running across Leicester Square to get front seats at the preview.
So yeah, the film has got muchos cool points before the first scene has rolled. It’s even made it’s mark on this seasons festival fashion radar; dressing up as a cat is officially last year, wolf suits and pointy ears are the look du jour for December’s ATP people.
But anyway, back to the highly anticipated flick. Director and visual wizard Spike Jonze says of his 12 year project “I didn’t set out to make a children’s movie, I set out to make a movie about childhood”. Fair enough. This plan however somewhat falls apart when you attempt to create an ‘adult’ feature length film on the theme of childhood from what is essentially a 250 word picture book about monsters.
The original story book (written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak) is a beautifully simple and awesomely drawn story about Max; an enraged little nine year old who finds a secret place in his bedroom ‘where the wild things are’, where he can retreat and rampage his frustration away with a bunch of lopsided, wonky toothed, vicious yet playful monsters. When he’s done rampaging around (for about 4 pages), he gets hungry and goes home for dinner.
The End.
Here are some of Sendak’s original monsters rampaging:
Jonze takes this skeleton of this story and creates his own hour and a half version of the tale (whilst also spaffing a huge amount of cash on costume builders, body actors, voice actors and “monster expression engineers”).
Here, for me, the problems lies. In order to tease the story out into a full blown feature, the creatives have felt obliged to build a somewhat obscure melange of slightly psychotic/bi-polar/paranoid/whimsical characters around the monsters, who Max then leads on rampages and kingdom building missions with varying degrees of success.
With the patented Jonze touch, this was always going to be a pretty damn good looking effort…
Atmospheric, floaty and whimsical, with frenzied monsters running riot through eerie forests and into heart warming sunsets..
Yes, the sets are heavenly, the monsters are physically pretty spot on, and Max – the kid actor – is ace (almost d0-able in fact). But the attempt to turn a beautifully simple book into a phycological investigation into human behaviour and relationships just doesn’t fly, especially when portrayed by a bunch of sexually ambiguous Honey Monster look a likes called Carole and Douglas.
You can’t help but feel it would have made an excellent music video (as the music and the visuals are undeniably brilliant), but the full length version, with all its pointless monster-to-kid heart to hearts and uninspiring dialogue, left me feeling pretty bored to be honest.
It’s worth a watch, that’s for sure. But I’m not sure that seeing it on a Sunday night sober in your local VU, packed in with a load of grown ups is the way forward. I’d recommend screening it on mute, with the sound track playing full blast, dressed in a wolf suit at 5am in a chalet at ATP. Followed by a rampage.
