4.5 out of 5 stars

The long-awaited feature film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s famed children’s book Where the Wild Things Are went through a lot of hard work, money, and struggles to finally come to theatres.  It can now be seen by anyone, and I highly recommend you should take the opportunity to bask in its glory.

Starring the aptly-named young actor Max Records as Max, the film begins with this nine-year-old hero using his imagination to deal with the world around him, which is filled with confusion, divorced parents, and a sister that is outgrowing him.  As tension rises, Max runs away from the his home and arrives in the land of the wild things, a seemingly magical land with huge creatures that could easily eat up a kid like Max any second but instead make Max their king.

These opening scenes present two very real worlds and one even more real child.  Records has a knack for using his emotions and fully encompassing the soul and thoughts of his character.  But the wild things aren’t designed to turn Max’s world into a wonderland; they actually make Max’s life tougher as the boy must learn to lead a group through turmoil and keep them together.  Here, Records proves himself as a truly great actor, realistically bearing heavy tasks and hardships.

The focus of the film, however, is on the wild things, beautifully acted and portrayed mixes of voice acting, suitmation, animatronics, and CGI faces.  Each wild thing represents a different facet of Max that Max must learn to understand and master, yet each wild thing is also a fully developed character with unique feelings and opinions.  Max gains a particular relationship with Carol, a needy and sad wild thing who tries to keep the group together but is always the reason the group gets torn apart.  Some of the wild things show great affection, others show anger and frustration, one of them nearly never speaks, and all of them are misunderstood.  They are epic proof of what can now be created in cinema, but the wild things are really just children.

The movie delves into childhood without fear of making parents uncomfortable or raising questions for children to ask.  The loneliness and lack of understanding children must contain provides the main backdrop to the film.  But the movie takes this theme and rises above its sad expectations – here is where the beauty and magic lies.

Each scene was shot with daring cinematography (think a peaceful Blair Witch-style that is easy to watch) and edited for the maximum emotional impact.  Few moments in the film gave me a chance to blink my eyes, relax in my chair, or close my gaping mouth as I was entranced heart and soul for one hundred minutes.  Every technical factor to the film adds up in a “more than the sum of its parts” fashion, with the off-beat script, indie-acoustic soundtrack, remarkable Australian scenery, and director Jonze’s special touch all coming together to form a heartfelt but bitterly hopeful creation.

Wild Things ends in a simple sequence, completely devoid of dialogue and strikingly memorable as it presents a climactic finale that still leaves room for the viewer to fill in the blank spots.  As Max leaves the island, all speaking stops for the rest of the film as Max sails to shore, arrives home, and eats his first meal onscreen.  The audience is never told whether Max actually went to the island or not.  The audience doesn’t learn what becomes of the wild things.

But how the movie ends isn’t what matters in the film.  Actually, none of the actual happenings matter much at all.  The importance of the film lies in the changes that occur in Max, a real child with real problems who learns to overcome them by creating one of the most magical lands our world has ever had the pleasure to visit.