Five seconds into the film, we already get pulled in to Max’s story thanks to the kinetic camerawork and perfectly matched soundtrack.  Seriously, how little time it takes Spike Jonze to suck us into the movie has to be record breaking.  The only other film that comes to mind that features such a natural running start is Lethal Weapon 2.  Good luck finding another film that pulls us into its world as quickly without coming across forced.

Max, played by Max Records, is a regular kid to us, an audience of strangers.  To the other characters in the film, he is someone’s son, someone’s little brother.  Since they are so close to him, that closeness distances them from him.  It’s that distance and Jonze’s personal filmmaking that puts us into Max’s head right off the bat, before any of the fantasy elements of the film ever take effect.  He comes across as a troublemaker, a bored kid starving for attention.  We understand him but at the same time see how he is misunderstood, at least to his sister and mom.  He may have friends but we don’t see them.  He runs around, plays outside in the snow and builds igloos.  When he engages in a snowball fight with his sister’s friends it goes a little too far, for him and us, but not for them.  He then takes it out on his sister’s room and gets in trouble.  Later he hangs out with his mom who comes home from work only to work at home.  She doesn’t shoo him away; she asks him to tell her a story and he does, which she dutifully types up on her computer, taking his dictation, appreciating her son’s imagination like a mother should.

This sets up his imagination, nothing too creative but just something to establish that he has creativity and no qualms about expressing it.  It may be setting up the kind of kid he is and the kind of journey we’re about to take with him, but it also shows us a single mother who is doing everything right, spending quality time with him, engaging with him, being a good mother yet at the same time it only temporarily satisfies his need for attention.  It’s not an excessive need not for a nine year old kid, anyway. 

Later that evening, when his mom, played by Catherine Keener, focuses her attention from her work to her visiting boyfriend, played by Mark Ruffalo, Max competes for some more of her attention, this time with unsuccessful results.  Dressed in a wolf costume, causing trouble and embarrassing his mom in front of her boyfriend, Max get, in the midst of getting yelled at does the only thing he can, escape.  He runs out of the house, in to the suburban streets and keeps running.  He ends up running into the forest, runs through it and ends up at a lake with a little sailboat on the beach.  He gets in and takes off, sails away...

Arriving on an island, Max runs into and meets the island’s inhabitants, the creatures with likenesses we’ve grown up with, voiced this time not by our kindergarten teacher reading us the book but by James Gandolfini as Carol, Paul Dano as Alexander, Catherine O’Hara as Judith, Forest Whitaker as Ira, Chris Cooper as Douglas and Lauren Ambrose as KW.  The well known voice actors aren’t distractions but as complimentary to the story as their illustrations were in the children’s book, finally giving voice to the decades long temp narration provided us by our nursery teachers, kindergarten teachers, parents and babysitters.The film is an honest children’s fantasy film.  It doesn’t feel designed to do anything but tell a story first and foremost.  Consider the really successful children’s fantasy films of the time, the Harry Potter series.  What those films lack, this film has in spades, simplicity.  The themes of those films have to be pulled out via an all too elaborate plot while this film unleashes it’s theme (and mood) within its first few seconds.

This is a potential cult classic if I’ve ever seen one.  Future generations of moviegoers, starting with this one, will bond over the experience of growing up with this film.  Just like the storybook is a footnote from our childhoods, Jonze’s film will be a staple in with subsequent generations.  This future cult classic’s inception may have been fueled by our nostalgia, but its staying power will be fueled by its timelessness.

I never read Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, I had it read to me…as a kid, like most of us.  This was decades ago so I can’t tell you how faithful Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers’ adaptation is but that’s irrelevant.  While much is being said about filling out the children’s book into the length of a feature, it’s that book’s illustrations that were adapted, with great success.  It’s just as much a visual adaptation as it is a literal one.  The film had so many opportunities to become just another kid’s book adaptation, it could’ve so easily just become standard fare, a product of its time, the 2009 version of Sendak’s children’s book, but it avoided that trap and should very easily become as timeless as the storybook it’s based on.

CraveOnline Rating: 8/10

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Rated PG.  94 minutes.  From Warner Bros.  Written by Dave Eggers & Spike Jonze.  Directed by Spike Jonze.  Based on the book by Maurice Sendak.  Photographed by Lance Accord, edited by Eric Zumbrunnen and James Haygood.  MPAA# 45516