Directed by Spike JonzeRuntime: 100 min.
By Armond White:
A FREEZE-FRAME of lonely suburban kid Max dressed in wolf pajamas and scampering wildly, boyishly indoors with his puppy announces Spike Jonze’s innovation in Where the Wild Things Are. It’s a snapshot of youth in extremis—the unruly innocence that movies usually hide in saccharine artifice. Jonze, master of lo-fi surrealism, captures youth’s anarchic, destructive undercurrent in that single image. It makes his feature-length vision of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s picture book immediately distinctive as the most daring kid’s-movie adaptation since Altman’s still-avant-garde Popeye from 1980.
Working at the height of his daring, Jonze turns Sendak’s childhood perennial into an adult work of art. The marketing motive that drives Hollywood’s family movies is missing here. Jonze refuses to make Max’s tantrum charming or soften his little boy’s loneliness. The scene where older teens destroy Max’s igloo in his snowy front yard is uniquely painful. Looking for attention, Max (Max Records) bites his mom (Catherine Keener) and runs off like a badtempered, disobedient pet—escaping into a fantasy world of towering creatures that is far stranger and scarier than any toy store display. Yet it’s also reassuringly familiar, evoking that timeless teddy bear in Spielberg’s A.I.This is startling proof that, like Altman in Popeye, Jonze takes his source material seriously—that is, personally.
Max’s tantrum and his imaginary selfexploration aren’t pandering family-film clichés; this is the anti-Harry Potter, anti-Pixar version of movie fantasy. And it’s not banally “dark”—in fact, the private world Max discovers has a vivid, fully realized topography, including a surf-lapping beachfront where Max survives a gorgeous shipwreck and a sun-bright desert where that frisky pup reappears. (“Don’t feed it; it will just follow you around.”) As conceived, this fantasyland is more than a dreamscape; it’s a psychic-scape—as if Max were inside his own movie. Jonze (with coscreenwriter David Eggers) interprets Sendak with generational specificity—not as a pre-schooler’s bedtime story but a daytime realization of childhood’s rages and complexes.
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Instead of Shrek-style jokes that keep viewers in pop-consumerist idiocy, Jonze elevates youth fiction, subtly mashing Sendak together with rock- and skateboard-culture anxieties. Max encounters English-speaking, animal-like creatures who mimic the selfishness he can’t fathom in real-world adults but that he also feels in himself.These argumentative, neurotic beasts are a fabrication/projection of his mirror-stage maturing process where he first grasps his individuality and understands others’. (Eggers gifts the creatures with comic quarrels and frustrations as credible as those in Popeye.) Jonze’s symbolic/ironic world reveals youth culture’s solipsism—it’s a long-overdue response to the self-indulgence ushered in by Nirvana’s Nevermind.The children’s film genre provides a therapeutic context for Grunge’s gratuitous unease as expressed in Nirvana’s “Sliver” lyric: “Grandma take me home.”
Because Jonze is a genuine artist of the video age—one who helped craft the visual language of the music video era—he’s able to discard the conventions that have stifled children’s movies. Bo Welch’s Cat in the Hat was equally radical, but its F.A.O. Schwarz Absurdism was too consciously self-reflexive for critics (and parents) who wanted Dr. Seuss domesticated with unquestioned product-placement. But Jonze masters a lo-fi/high-art style that at least looks miles away from Pixar’s trite, costly artifice.The wide-faced, friendly beasts often shift into horned, fanged animals of angsty, Boschlike freakiness.These oversized puppets and gargoyles bicker and opine like inhabitants of a kibbutz—a symbolic experiment in socialization. (Sendak admits modeling them after his own Jewish relatives.) They occupy a forest with huts constructed from rowed, pattern branches that suggest mad artschool Serialism.
This wildlife parallel to Max’s suburban world recalls the globe he treasures from his absent father. Its inscription: “To Max, Owner of this world. Love, Dad.” Jonze symbolizes Max’s egotism to convey the blessing/curse of childhood entitlement.Yet he avoids the regular pampering artifice of children’s movies that suspiciously imitate innocuous Broadway musicals. Instead, delicate rock accompanies Max’s New World capering; a dirt clod fight that disrupts the idyll has the same satirical panache of Jonze’s famous Beastie Boys’ music video “Sabotage.” He has developed an extraordinary sense of meaningful whimsy as in such music videos as Bjork’s “Triumph of a Heart,” Ludacris’ “Get Back,” Notorious B.I.G.’s “Sky’s the Limit,” P. Diddy’s “It’s All About the Benjamins” and Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” where psychological tension is conveyed through original, iconoclastic scenography. Jonze’s sensibility is an authentic development of the music-video era’s generational split—which is also an aesthetic split. He doesn’t exploit pop rebellion but has a counter-intuitive slant on what’s funny, sad, universal.
Jonze’s debut feature, Being John Malkovich, was so wildly original it has had no serious imitators. It’s still indefinably fresh; and freshness also marks Where The Wild Things Are. It was necessary that Jonze get rid of the Charlie Kaufman influence (remember that awful Adaptation?). His ingenuity is better than braininess—as when Max’s mother’s voice emerges from the world’s biggest, wisest stuffed animal. Not just a spoof on celebrity voices in animated films (Lauren Ambrose uncannily duplicates Catherine Keener’s neurotic cadences), it’s also an uncanny evocation of maternal warmth.When Max steps into his make-believe world of larger-than-life beasts, these projections from his own imagination perfectly express Jonze’s art. Fittingly, Max/Jonze is told, “There’s a spark to your work that can’t be taught.”
A FREEZE-FRAME of lonely suburban kid Max dressed in wolf pajamas and scampering wildly, boyishly indoors with his puppy announces Spike Jonze’s innovation in Where the Wild Things Are. It’s a snapshot of youth in extremis—the unruly innocence that movies usually hide in saccharine artifice. Jonze, master of lo-fi surrealism, captures youth’s anarchic, destructive undercurrent in that single image. It makes his feature-length vision of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s picture book immediately distinctive as the most daring kid’s-movie adaptation since Altman’s still-avant-garde Popeye from 1980.
Working at the height of his daring, Jonze turns Sendak’s childhood perennial into an adult work of art. The marketing motive that drives Hollywood’s family movies is missing here. Jonze refuses to make Max’s tantrum charming or soften his little boy’s loneliness. The scene where older teens destroy Max’s igloo in his snowy front yard is uniquely painful. Looking for attention, Max (Max Records) bites his mom (Catherine Keener) and runs off like a badtempered, disobedient pet—escaping into a fantasy world of towering creatures that is far stranger and scarier than any toy store display. Yet it’s also reassuringly familiar, evoking that timeless teddy bear in Spielberg’s A.I.This is startling proof that, like Altman in Popeye, Jonze takes his source material seriously—that is, personally.
Max’s tantrum and his imaginary selfexploration aren’t pandering family-film clichés; this is the anti-Harry Potter, anti-Pixar version of movie fantasy. And it’s not banally “dark”—in fact, the private world Max discovers has a vivid, fully realized topography, including a surf-lapping beachfront where Max survives a gorgeous shipwreck and a sun-bright desert where that frisky pup reappears. (“Don’t feed it; it will just follow you around.”) As conceived, this fantasyland is more than a dreamscape; it’s a psychic-scape—as if Max were inside his own movie. Jonze (with coscreenwriter David Eggers) interprets Sendak with generational specificity—not as a pre-schooler’s bedtime story but a daytime realization of childhood’s rages and complexes.
Related content
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Related to:jonzeintomaxjonzesitsmaxsworldblack
Instead of Shrek-style jokes that keep viewers in pop-consumerist idiocy, Jonze elevates youth fiction, subtly mashing Sendak together with rock- and skateboard-culture anxieties. Max encounters English-speaking, animal-like creatures who mimic the selfishness he can’t fathom in real-world adults but that he also feels in himself.These argumentative, neurotic beasts are a fabrication/projection of his mirror-stage maturing process where he first grasps his individuality and understands others’. (Eggers gifts the creatures with comic quarrels and frustrations as credible as those in Popeye.) Jonze’s symbolic/ironic world reveals youth culture’s solipsism—it’s a long-overdue response to the self-indulgence ushered in by Nirvana’s Nevermind.The children’s film genre provides a therapeutic context for Grunge’s gratuitous unease as expressed in Nirvana’s “Sliver” lyric: “Grandma take me home.”
Because Jonze is a genuine artist of the video age—one who helped craft the visual language of the music video era—he’s able to discard the conventions that have stifled children’s movies. Bo Welch’s Cat in the Hat was equally radical, but its F.A.O. Schwarz Absurdism was too consciously self-reflexive for critics (and parents) who wanted Dr. Seuss domesticated with unquestioned product-placement. But Jonze masters a lo-fi/high-art style that at least looks miles away from Pixar’s trite, costly artifice.The wide-faced, friendly beasts often shift into horned, fanged animals of angsty, Boschlike freakiness.These oversized puppets and gargoyles bicker and opine like inhabitants of a kibbutz—a symbolic experiment in socialization. (Sendak admits modeling them after his own Jewish relatives.) They occupy a forest with huts constructed from rowed, pattern branches that suggest mad artschool Serialism.
This wildlife parallel to Max’s suburban world recalls the globe he treasures from his absent father. Its inscription: “To Max, Owner of this world. Love, Dad.” Jonze symbolizes Max’s egotism to convey the blessing/curse of childhood entitlement.Yet he avoids the regular pampering artifice of children’s movies that suspiciously imitate innocuous Broadway musicals. Instead, delicate rock accompanies Max’s New World capering; a dirt clod fight that disrupts the idyll has the same satirical panache of Jonze’s famous Beastie Boys’ music video “Sabotage.” He has developed an extraordinary sense of meaningful whimsy as in such music videos as Bjork’s “Triumph of a Heart,” Ludacris’ “Get Back,” Notorious B.I.G.’s “Sky’s the Limit,” P. Diddy’s “It’s All About the Benjamins” and Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” where psychological tension is conveyed through original, iconoclastic scenography. Jonze’s sensibility is an authentic development of the music-video era’s generational split—which is also an aesthetic split. He doesn’t exploit pop rebellion but has a counter-intuitive slant on what’s funny, sad, universal.
Jonze’s debut feature, Being John Malkovich, was so wildly original it has had no serious imitators. It’s still indefinably fresh; and freshness also marks Where The Wild Things Are. It was necessary that Jonze get rid of the Charlie Kaufman influence (remember that awful Adaptation?). His ingenuity is better than braininess—as when Max’s mother’s voice emerges from the world’s biggest, wisest stuffed animal. Not just a spoof on celebrity voices in animated films (Lauren Ambrose uncannily duplicates Catherine Keener’s neurotic cadences), it’s also an uncanny evocation of maternal warmth.When Max steps into his make-believe world of larger-than-life beasts, these projections from his own imagination perfectly express Jonze’s art. Fittingly, Max/Jonze is told, “There’s a spark to your work that can’t be taught.”
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