DIRECTOR JONZE GIVES STAR RECORDS A PIGGYBACK RIDE ON LOCATION

Woof! woof! woof! woof! woof! woof! woof!. . .woof!

Where the Wild Things Are is a classic children's story by Maurice Sendak that won the 1964 Caldecott Medal as the "Most Distinguished Picture Book of the Year." In the story a child is sent to bed without any supper and sails off to a magical land in his imagination, a forest full of big wild fat creatures who accept him as their king.

The movie version, directed by Spoke Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), is a strange film, not least because it's 101 minutes long and based on a book containing only ten sentences (Dave Eggers helped Jonze do his expanded version). The Wild Things are a "dysfunctional" group. That's the word used in an interview by Max Records, the adorable and very bright actor who plays the boy, who was ten during the shoot. The look of Where the Wild Things Are is special, even in an era of much experimentation in technique and in animating and simulating fantasies. Here, a real boy moves among a group of giant sized doll-like creatures, which are real people in fat suits.

The wolf suit. When Max runs away in the movie (he doesn't go to bed; he finds a boat and sails off) to escape being punished because he has bitten his mother (Catherine Keener -- who looks like him) he is wearing a "wolf suit," a wooly pullover with ears, a tail and big whiskers. Maybe it helps him hide from the Wild Things that he's just a boy. According to Records, there were something like 57 suits used, with different amounts of dirt on them.

The child's world. The beauty of the film is that before the fantasy begins it thoroughly enters into the world of the boy, who is playing alone in the snow. A bunch of neighborhood kids come and he starts a snowball fight with them and has tons of fun, till they all pile onto his igloo and smash it and him. Then he cries. Never before has a movie shown so well the aloneness and sorrow of a child whose play is ruined.

The vision. Jonze's genius comes through in the DIY quality of the special effects -- the more remarkable in a film that cost a hundred million dollars. It may not in fact have been easy to construct giant animatronic animal fat suits and have people moving them around in a forest, but they look not like some Pixar wizardry but a bunch of big dolls pushed (well, independently moving, but pushed by a child's imagination) here and there (with CGI added for their facial expressions). At the same time they talk (with the voices of Paul Dano, Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper, James Gandolfini, and Lauren Ambrose) and have expressions, but the boy, Max, is there among them, always looking much more real than they do. Many shots are dark and crowded with the big forms of the creatures, and the camera is mostly handheld and jumpy -- a note of realism in fantasy land that is most welcome. To make fantasy real is important. To make it look unlike any other film fantasy is remarkable. Many of the shots of Max among the Wild Things -- Carol, Alexander, Judith, The Bull, Ira, Douglas, KW, and The Goat -- are dark, almost blurry, because they're seen from the point of view of Max, the boy, who's dwarfed and engulfed by them. Thus by breaking all the rules of framing and clear presentation Jonze and his DP Lance Accord have given the film a unique look and feel, a child's-eye view of a dream world that's exciting and fun, yet also dark and scary.

But in their invention of the Wild Things as what Variety's senior reviewer Todd McCarthy calls "middle-aged urban kibitzers, vaguely complainy and neurotic," the filmmakers have, as McCarthy puts it, "defanged" the situation, even though this "is a choice with some wit behind it." Their ordinariness (within the extraordinary, fantastic place Max has entered) makes them cuddly and appealing even though they're giants and could crush Max and are said to have eaten all previous kings who've come their way. It's an original choice, but one that's not quite justified by Sendak's story (though Sendak loves the movie) and also one that removes some of the magic of a child's adventure. And it's also true that the seventy-odd minutes of time Max spends on the island are a lot of random galumphing around, without much suspense or drive. Nonetheless it all gives one the feel of being in a child's world: kids kind of like galumphing around, and they have attention spans that are intense but brief.

The dysfunctionality. This is, after all, a lugubrious journey for Max. He may enjoy being a king, but he reigns over a bunch of fussy old fools. The Wild Things are children acting like adults. They're also adults acting like children. Either way, it can be rather a bore at times. This may not matter to the very small children who watched the film when I did, because it's still an adventure. It's still a small boy in a strange land triumphing over adversity, and what's not to like about that? You just wouldn't want to spend much time with these critters. For me over an hour was too long, but it does end.

Finally Jonze does a fine job, with his whole band behind him, not least the wonderful Max Records, who though he may have the mind of a 30-year-old in real life as somebody said, still knows very well how to be a 10-year-old child, and when he woofs like a dog or throws big clods of dirt, these are the most joyous and spontaneous moments in any movie this year.

Oh, by the way, the critters are wonderful looking, and quite a lot like Sendak's original drawings. The original music by by Karen O (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) is fresh and pleasant, though after a while it has a sameness about it. The way this movie departs from the pre-fab slickness of most animated children's films is nicely underlined by the scribbly opening and closing material and all the publicity. This is a case where an artist got his intentions respected on a big budget movie all the way through.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.