The unconventional beauty of Where the Wild Things Are

Spike Jonze’s misunderstood film still remains an ambiguous and elusive wonder

The opening moments of 2009’s Where the Wild Things Are — Spike Jonze’s misunderstood feature-length expansion of Maurice Sendak’s three hundred and thirty-eight-word children’s classic — perfectly encapsulates its spirit. They are at once exhilarating and nostalgic. Jonze’s camera crashes down the stairs with two ferocious beasts locked in a fierce chase, barely able to contain them within its slim frame. One of the beasts is a lonely, yet imaginative, nine-year-old called Max — played brilliantly by namesake Max Records. The other is his only true friend: his dog. As Max eventually catches his prey in his pincer-like claws, the camera takes a moment to freeze upon his face, simultaneously introducing the film and the beautiful juxtaposition that lies at its heart. Max’s face is locked somewhere between a ferocious, animalistic roar and a wide, beaming smile.

Much of the film’s proceedings balance upon that knife-edge between fun and danger. Just minutes later a gleeful snowball fight ends in tears for Max. It is an idea expanded upon later in the film when a dirt-clod fight — a euphoric scene where Max and the Wild Things tear through the forest surrounded by firework-like explosions of dirt and leaves — ends in a similar unhappiness, but this time Max is to blame as opposed to being on the receiving end. The film’s entire design continues to evoke this idea, even down to the design of the eponymous Wild Things. Jonze employed The Jim Henson Company to construct giant puppet suits that evoke a fantastical aesthetic of wonderland realism. Like Sendak’s marvellously goofy illustrations, they appear perfectly soft and fluffy for a cuddle — and their faces can display an array of anthropomorphic emotions beyond their animalistic nature, often appearing affectionate and docile — but their terrible claws and jagged teeth constantly remind us of the danger that these hulking great beasts possess.

Ultimately however, it was the darker, more unsettling side to the Wild Things that led to the film’s financial and critical downfall. Jonze, in collaboration with fellow screenwriter Dave Eggers, chose to develop a much-loved picture book — about a boy called Max who upon being sent to his room for causing mischief, travels to a fantasy land of wild beasts, before returning home in time for tea — into an introspective and somewhat surreal fantasy that the original book only ever hinted at. Liam Lacey, in The Globe and Mail, asked, “Who is this self-consciously sad film for?”, and David Denby of The New Yorker wrote about having “a vision of eight-year-olds leaving the movie in bewilderment.” The latter was certainly true, with questions being raised about the film’s suitability for children. For many it was a more a case of “Where the Mildly Depressed Things Are” than an imaginative tale of childhood nirvana.

If anything, Where the Wild Things Are certainly isn’t a conventional children’s film. It’s hard to think of many films quite like it — if any at all. Perhaps its closest cousins hail from Japan, those beautiful films that Studio Ghibli consistently produces. In particular, Hayao Miyazaki’s fantasy creations, such as Oscar-winning masterpiece Spirited Away, and the emotional journey My Neighbour Totoro. American films aren’t usually as abstracted and ambiguous in their depiction of ideas as Where the Wild Things Are or Spirited Away, films that take their protagonists and viewers to fantastical realms of endless possibility, operating on a logic not based on rationality, but emotionality.

Max is a volatile and lonely child, and it is these strong childhood emotions that Jonze’s unique film aims to tap into. “Max, go play with your friends,” pleads his annoyed sister, but really he doesn’t have any. He craves the attention of his mother (Catherine Keener) and sister who appear to only have time for the other men in their lives. Because of this, Max learns that he must use his imagination to quench his insatiable desire to play, seemingly imagining an entire world of towering forests with their own wildlife, Dali-esque deserts with giant behemoths dogs, and endless stormy seas, into existence. Just like Sendak before them, Jonze and Eggers know that there is nothing more powerful than the imagination of a child, a perspective of the world where the real and the unreal become almost indistinguishable.

The fantasy world of the film was shot in real-life locations of the Australian wilderness, in harsh, remote terrain, often accessible only by four-wheel-drive vehicles, because Jonze “wanted it to be as natural feeling as possible.” For Max, this phantasmagoria of pent-up emotion is as real as anything. Working with a warm, gooey, polaroid-like patina of browns, oranges, and greens, Jonze and long-time cinematographer Lance Acord, seem to be evoking something that was discarded long ago in childhood. It is the warmth that a strong imagination can bring to an otherwise grey and murky suburban world. It is this childlike innocence, where it only takes a few blankets and pillows to transform even the blandest rooms of a house into bottomless fantasy worlds, that is the film’s life-force.

In Max’s spontaneous dreamworld, the film appears to drop any sense of a traditional narrative. Each of the Wild Things seems to represent a different emotion or feeling that exists within the mind of young Max, and therefore represents a challenge that he must overcome. One of the largest misunderstandings of the film is that the Wild Things never receive their own narrative or emotional arc, finishing the film in a similar glum and mopey state to which they began it. But that is only because they are unchained projections of a child’s enraged imagination. In this world of his creation, Max finds a sense of simulated domesticity amongst his newfound family. Not only are the Wild Things reflections of Max’s internal feelings, but reflections of familial roles that Max has come to encounter in his short life. Carol, voiced by James Gandolfini, becomes Max’s closest friend. “See, this guy gets it,” says Carol about Max when they first meet, and he is as impulsive and reckless as Max, bearing grudges against those who do not align with his dangerously puckish view of the world. He is the greatest reflection of Max himself within this dysfunctional family. K.W. (Lauren Ambrose) is the distant mother figure, seemingly distracted from the group by her new friends Bob and Terry, and blamed by the jealous Carol for abandoning him and the group. In this sense, she not only reflects Max’s mother, who Max catches with another man, but also his sister and her “stupid” boyfriend. Effectively, K.W. is a representation of the female figures in Max’s life. Alternatively, Carol and K.W.’s relationship can be interpreted as a simulation of Max’s family before the divorce, something that is heavily implied by the film. Max has withdrawn into himself and his complex mind, and the fantasies of the film are inspired and born out of familial traumas that have been inflicted upon him unknowingly by divorce, and the eventual loneliness that came with it. Other characters, such as Paul Dano’s anxious, awkward, and belittled Alexander, and a dark, brooding minotaur-like beast called Bernard, represent the darker sides of Max’s personality that are brought out in the domestic conflictions that make up the earlier parts of the film.

Jonze is perhaps just as famous for his feature films such as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Her, as he is for his music and skating videos, and also his work with Jackass. Where the Wild Things Are is filmed with the same emotional weight as his previous features, and the same stupid relish as his videos and Jackass. Just as in those daredevil films, people smash things, throw things at one another, and the apparent cruelty inflicted upon each other is all in the name of fun. With Where the Wild Things Are, Jonze was given his biggest budget to date, and therefore a massive toy-box to play with. There is plenty of Jonze in young Max. Like Jackass, the world of Where the Wild Things Are is a natural depiction of the controlled chaos that children long for. Every Wild Thing is given a place and a role within this imagined domestic utopia of never-ending rough play, where Max promises to keep out all the sadness. In this world of playful chaos — and a family of friends to share it with — bedlam can be managed and controlled by supreme ruler King Max. Though Max seems to have control over the simulated individuals of his dream, there is also that fear and uncertainty, perfectly represented in the juxtapositions made between the caring, smiling nature of the beasts, and one particularly creepy scene where it appears Max is about to be eaten alive. This is just like the workings of the mind. And just as it is back home, the fun can only last for so long before getting serious, and in the end Max’s utopia becomes a place where he must wrestle with his own interior emotions before he is ready to return home.

Where the Wild Things Are is a subversion of the hero’s journey, or at least the one that many might expect from a children’s fantasy film. The film opens with its equilibrium: a nostalgic world of childhood mischief, before our hero sets out on his epic journey. But rather than developing as expected, Max’s quest takes him to an introspective dreamworld where pent-up issues are explored with strange, yet powerful effect. The only antagonists of this film are Max’s own emotional issues, and the closing moments of the film — equally as beautiful as its opening moments — perfectly encapsulate everything that he has learnt and been through on his emotional journey. Throughout the film we have been placed inside Max’s subjectivity. We see from his perspective, looking up at his mum from underneath her writing desk as she works, and Max tries to attract her attention from below. This camera motif is repeated later through the hazy first moments after awakening and noticing the minutiae of the giant beast Carol, such as the sun shining past his horn and his shadow being traced upon the ground. But in the film’s final moments — with all the film’s emotional events laid out before it — Max’s subjectivity seems to have changed. Not so much in the way that Jonze chooses to shoot the scene, but in the way that the film’s own narrative context has now informed the shots. Max now understands his mum — she is as lonely as he is; the divorce is just as hard for her, yet she has Max and adult responsibilities to contend with as well — and he has learnt to see from someone else’s perspective: an important lesson in growing up. Perhaps this is where the film’s immeasurable sense of relatability spawns from. It is a film that rewards multiple viewings, not so much because upon each rewatch you notice new things, further nuances, and deeper patterns, but because it is a film that matures with its viewer.

Jonze indicated that his goal was “to make a movie about childhood” rather than to make one for childhood. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s a nostalgic film, capturing childhood perfectly. Never before has childhood been challenged like this, by a film that hopes to challenge the very children who consume it, no less. As Saki Knafo observes in the New York Times profile, “In Hollywood, successful children’s movies operate on rules straight from the Joseph Campbell playbook. Heroes take journeys, they go on quests, they get lost and try to find their way home. Their motivations are precisely stated, their obstacles clearly identified.” Where the Wild Things Are is a film that hopes to transcend the boundaries of this idea. It is at once simple and complex: a unifying whole working towards its goals. The brilliant soundtrack — composed by Karen O — has pieces of slow emotional tension broken up by frenetic childish punk that drives the wilder moments of the story. This collision of the film’s elements — a forceful meeting point between a child’s playful imagination and the psychological realities of divorce — disappointed many viewers whom found the film too self-serious, miserable, and dark for the children that it was originally aimed at. Many who loved the book claimed it missed the point and replaced the magic with misery. But, surprisingly, its writer was more than happy. Sendak really wanted Jonze, fighting against a doubting Warner Bros. for him to remain at the head of the project. He had even been through two different directors’ visions over two years of preliminary creative work before finding Jonze. This is perhaps the film’s biggest endorsement, and like Sendak’s description of his own literary creation, Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is able to “skip from fantasy to reality in the conviction that both exist.”