Where the Wild Things Are is a wolf in sheep’s clothing

In Maurice Sendak's award-winning and much-loved 1963 children's story Where the Wild Things Are, the nine-year-old hero Max - a mischievous boy in a wolfsuit who sails away to an exotic land - is made king of the wild things, despite their attempts to scare him by "rolling their terrible eyes" and "gnashing their terrible teeth".
 
Several film critics have also been rolling their eyes and gnashing their teeth over Spike Jonze's adaptation of the nine-sentence children's picture book into a feature-length film.
 
Jonze, director of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, has attempted to fill in the psychological backstory of Max. With his co-writer Dave Eggers, he has made the protagonist (played by newcomer Max Records) a lonesome kid who is being brought up by his single mom (Catherine Keener) while resenting her new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo).

As result, the mystery and the nuances of the book are gone, according to some critics. As the Guardian's Xan Brooks put it, the movie has become an extrapolation and an explanation of Sendak's story - "a cinematic York Notes".  He adds: "In telling us - definitively - what Sendak's story is about, it risks letting too much sunlight into these shadowed nooks."
 
Not everyone agrees with this sentiment. Time magazine's Mary F Pols believes Jonze "has done a masterly job of bringing Sendak's work to the screen".

On one issue, there is very little dissent - Where the Wild Things Are looks superb. The 'wild things' are embodied by adults in furry costumes, given computer-generated facial expressions and voiced by actors including James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker and Catherine O'Hara.
 
As for the box office, Jonze's film has caused a suitably "wild rumpus" in the US, taking $32.5m over its opening weekend.
 
WHAT THEY ARE SAYING:
 
Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times: "The problem with this cast of characters is not so much their personalities but the way screenwriters Jonze and Eggers have turned them into neurotic adults with dysfunctional relationships. To hear them talk among themselves is to feel like you've stumbled onto a group therapy session involving unfunny refugees from an alternate universe Woody Allen movie. It's not a good feeling!" (Verdict: 2/5 stars)
 
Ben Walters, Time Out: "Where the Wild Things Are stands out for its unusually potent evocation of the timbre of childhood imagining, with its combination of the outré and the banal, grand schemes jumbled up with delicate feelings and the urge to smash things up." (4/5)

Xan Brooks, the Guardian: "[Jonze and Eggers] rustle up a melancholy rite of passage that's not so much a children's film as a movie that, deliberately, looks back at childhood from an adult perspective. This sense of distance is all very well, but it keeps us at arm's length from the action, framing Max's escapade in terms of a teasing, cerebral thesis... I waited in vain for the rumpus to start." (3/5)
 
Mary F Pols, Time: "The beauty of Where the Wild Things Are is that for all its fantastical elements, it's a work of realism, an exploration of mood and emotion. Like Sendak's book, which on initial publication was considered too edgy and creepy by some critics and libraries, the movie is dark, but it is perhaps even more richly cathartic."
 
Dan Jolin, Empire: "Small children... would do well to avoid going to Where The Wild Things Are. This is a ten-years-and-up deal, too emotionally intense for rugrats. An opening sequence in which Max has his igloo stomped by his teen sister's friends and then crumples into tears is keenly upsetting, while the increasing sense that Max could end up among the skeletal human remains lying among the ashes of the wild things' camp engenders a throb of disquiet better absorbed by more seasoned souls." (4/5) ·