I can't think of many movies from the last few years that I was anticipating as much as Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are.  It's not because I love the book or because I love Spike Jonze--it's because I was afraid that the strange and challenging movie that it looked like he was making might not ever see the light of day.  Though I didn't love the finished product unconditionally, I think it's pretty clear that he made the movie that he wanted to make and it's something special.

The central premise is that young Max acts up and gets sent to bed without any dinner, so he runs away to a place that is inhabited by Wild Things.  They make him king, they have a rumpus, he gets bored and hungry, and eventually he goes back home and has dinner.  There's not to work with there, but somehow Jonze finds a complex and compelling story and he brings it to life perfectly.  It would have been so easy for this film to go off the rails into the kind of schlock that we've seen a million times before that I have to marvel at Jonze's genius a little.  Though his films never sweep me off my feet, they always wind up being thoughtful, a little bit absurd, and somewhat unexpected.

I'm not sure this is a movie for kids, though.  I don't have any kids of my own and I'm much too far removed from being one myself to know for sure, but it doesn't strike me as a kid-friendly movie.  It's not too scary, and I don't think that kids need neon-colored slapstick to stay entertained.  Instead, I think the movie is maybe just too complex for kids who haven't yet matured emotionally.  The relationships are a little ambiguous and the characters' motivations are never all that simple.  In one sense, each of the Wild Things is like a part of Max personified, but in another, they are all more complicated and more worldly than Max himself.  The Wild Things seem to have their own, possibly hidden agenda that they don't always let Max in on, which is an intriguing concept.  The Wild Things are clearly figments of Max's imagination, but if that's the case, why do they sometimes act in ways that Max doesn't seem to understand?  This is one of the things I loved about the movie--that it perfectly captured Max's view of the world, even in the way he attributed adult emotions and inexplicable behaviors to the monsters--but that's one of the things I think it would be hard for a kid to get.

Maybe I'm just being more cerebral about it, and not giving kids enough credit.  I'd be very interested to hear from parents who took their kids to this one to see what the kids said they got out of it.  There are some great, touching moments in the film, but they don't strike me as the kind of moments I would have remembered as a kid.  I'm so happy to see a piece of art like this come out of a system that is so geared towards entertainment of the lowest common denominator.  While the film didn't have the emotional impact on me that the trailer did, it was still pretty great and it's a movie I've thought about a great deal more after the credits than almost any other movie this year.  I can't wait to see what Spike Jonze does next--I'm still waiting for his inarguable masterpiece and I know he has one in him.