Within the first five minutes of Where the Wild Things Are the protagonist Max is caught in a freeze frame, a moment of reckless, furious playfulness suspended in time. Perhaps a reference to the shot that closes François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, it’s a telling detail that indicates what a remarkable film Wild Things is, audacious even for a mainstream American film with a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Certainly I can’t think of a Hollywood film so dedicated to presenting childhood not as a privileged state of innocence but as a complex experience of confusing emotions.

The original book on which Wild Things was based (by Maurice Sendak) is the story of a mischievous boy disciplined by his mother who, reduced to Max’s level of anger, sends him to his room. Within his room, Max’s fury and wild imagination transports him to a dark, exotic forest populated by monsters over whom Max rules as king. The book spans a mere ten sentences which seems like it would be a daunting task to adapt the book to a film. What Spike Jonze and his co-writer Dave Eggers have done is not a simple faithful recreation of the text with some backstory filled in: In a lot of respects, the film is quite different from the book. Rather, Jonze and Eggers have retained the iconography of Sendak’s illustrations and Sendak’s storytelling ethos of taking seriously the fears and joys of kids and in all other respects left themselves free to paint their own portrait of a 9-year-old boy rampaging his own peculiar way through the terrain of childhood.

And what a tough terrain it is. Max is feeling abandonment issues as his teenaged sister pulls away to hang with friends her own age. He suffers from territorial anxiety as his single mother starts dating a new man. Max is also a touch more reflective than Max from the book and feels a ton of confusion and guilt over his various tantrums and episodes of acting out. When Max arrives at where the wild things are, the monsters he encounters constitute a dysfunctional family of sorts that echo the emotional dynamic of Max’s homelife but also have a life of their own.

Already, there is a major change from the book. While the monsters of the book are a manifestation of Max’s anger, the monsters of Spike Jonze’s film reflect a much wider emotional palette. This is a smart choice because I doubt two hours of a wild rumpus would be a great film. But it’s also a brave choice because rather than being the crowd-pleasing catharsis fest that the Arcade Fire-soundtracked trailer suggested, the actual film has a deep melancholy air.¹ Wild Things the film is basically Maurice Sendak by way of Charles Schulz.

Bill Watterson on Charles Schulz’s Peanuts:

Peanuts books were among the first things I ever read, and once I saw them, I knew I wanted to be a cartoonist. I instantly related to the flat, spare drawings, the honesty of the children’s insecurities, and to Snoopy’s bizarre and separate world. At the time, I didn’t appreciate how innovative all that was – I just knew it had a kind of humor and truth that other strips lacked. Now when I reread the old books, I’m amazed at what a melancholy comic strip it was in the ’60s. Surely no other strip has presented a world so relentlessly cruel and heartless. Charlie Brown’s self-torture in the face of constant failure is funny in a bitter, hopelessly sad way. I think the most important thing I learned from Peanuts is that a comic strip can have an emotional edge to it and that it can talk about the big issues of life in a sensitive and perceptive way.

If Where the Wild Things Are is similar to Peanuts in that it’s cast of characters represent the range of neuroses that kids deal with, Max himself is most reminiscent of Bill Watterson’s Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. Max’s particular mixture of anarchy and introspection so strongly brought to mind Watterson’s universe that I found myself believing in the sacriligious idea that Calvin and Hobbes could be adapted into a live-action movie.

Spike Jonze’s version of Where the Wild Things Are has many subtle allusions to classic children’s stories. Max’s arrival in a fantasy land and assumption of the throne under false pretenses is not unlike the arrival of the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz. The Wild Things’ desire for a parent is not unlike that of the Lost Boys of Peter Pan.² But what will surely make this film endure is not the “cleverness” of these references but the fact that it takes kids seriously. The film is attentive to the sadness of being a child, the loneliness, all the scary wild emotions that are an inevitable part of life. One of the ideas that the film raises is the idea that nothing can protect you from being hurt; that there is no benevolent and all-powerful being that can keep out the sadness. This is a particularly terrifying notion, especially, I imagine, for the parents who are already terrified of their kid discovering there is no Santa Claus.

¹ For the sake of closure, I feel I must address the criticism of Mel Campbell since we had that “tedious online stoush” earlier this year. Man, her review of WTWTA is just awful. Her opening paragraph proposes the question: Have Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers done justice to the memories of “Generation Coolsie”? (Her terminology, not mine!) It’s a manifestly absurd notion that Where the Wild Things Are belongs to a so-called “Generation Coolsie”: Who exactly is this demographic? The book was published in 1963 so pre-dates any notion of what may be the contemporary “cool generation”. But somehow Campbell’s strained hipster posturing requires that she reads the text through the non-existent framework of hipster appreciation. The most irritating part of her review is at the end when she writes: “But it really annoyed me that Eggers made Max’s real-life worries dog him in his own imagination.” This is a curious sentence because Campbell is feigning reverence for a book that apparently she hasn’t read or, at least, has severely misunderstood. After the wild rumpus, Max yells at the Wild Things and sends them to bed without their dinner. He is assuming the parental role and fairly obviously dealing with his problems at home, that is, his mother losing her temper at him and sending him to his room without dinner. So in the book, Max’s real-life worries explicitly do dog him in how own imagination and it is hardly subtext. It is an integral part of the book. Campbell is desperate to make herself a cultural figure of authority by criticising a text that has resonated with what might loosely be defined as the hipster crowd. But all she has really shown in her Wild Things review is the disingenuousness of her respect for the original book by Sendak.

² I was insistent that the fort that the Wild Things build is a visual reference to the construction of the Deathstar in Return of the Jedi, however my friends that I saw Wild Things at the cinema with were not convinced.

[Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and is currently based in Tokyo.]