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Where the Wild Things Are

Catherine Keener, Forest Whitaker, Catherine O'Hara, James Gandolfini

I truly worry about this generation of children. As I have grown older, I have come to see that my childhood was the last gasp of a generation. My friends were all the third, fourth, fifth, and in one case the ninth child of the large families that populated the town. Even though a pool had been built, we still swam in the river. Every Saturday found us in the large yard behind the hospital playing touch football that more often than not devolved into something that resembled an organized barroom brawl. There was the movie later that night, church on Sunday, little league in the summer, cub scouts once a month, one day of Punt, Pass and Kick, maybe for some of us piano lessons once a week, and after that, not much else. In the summers and on weekends, our mothers kicked us out of the house in the morning and the rest of the day we had to come up with our own Lord of the Flies entertainment. There was no AAU, no soccer leagues, no martial arts training, no after school programs, no clubs or organizations with their organized activities, no teaching assistants, just a poor woman at the front of the classroom who had to corral more children than any woman should have to deal with or could deal with. No Internet, just Pong. No cable television, just four crappy channels that more often than not had a Billy Graham crusade, a Jerry Lewis telethon, or Bob Hope strolling around some army base with a golf club on his shoulder in some godforsaken hellhole or Burt Parks singing, “There she is, Miss America,” which no child should ever have to suffer through. Friends today, they are usually in their minivans or SUVs hauling their crumb cruncher from one activity to the next or standing on the sidelines of the soccer game with juice and cookies at the ready. The kids have the Internet, Youtube, Myspace, and texting. Every minute of the day is programmed from the minute they open their eyes in the morning until they close them at night and it makes me worry.

On one level, we are creating a generation of good workers, kids, who will be able to put on the tie and blazer in a few years, walk lockstep into corporate America, punch the clock, and never realize that life is passing them by. No real creativity because the imagination is like any muscle in the body. It takes time and a lot of work to exercise it. On any given day when I was a kid, I was riding herd with John Wayne, playing centerfield for the New York Yankees, flying with the Red Baron, exploring new planets, trudging through the deepest part of dark Africa with my pith helmet and machete, running away with the circus, leaping rooftop to rooftop with Batman, and climbing in the Alps. Without CGI, there was no way Hollywood could capture the worlds found in the pages of books like “Lord of The Rings,” “The Chronicles of Narnia,” or “The Adventures of Spider-Man.” Your imagination, it was where the wild things grow.

That last line is the aptly named title of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book which won the 1964 Caldecott Medal, the 1970 Hans Christian Anderson Award, the 2003 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and was an ALA Notable Book. It is the story of a little boy named Max’s imagination and much of the success of it is due to Sendak’s limitations as an illustrator. When he originally conceived of the project, he envisioned the little boy visiting a world of horses but Sendak could not draw the four-legged beasts to his satisfaction. So, he changed the inhabitants of that land to monsters who were named after and looked like his uncles (Aaron, Bernard, Emil, Moishe and Tzippy). The illustrated book shares with young readers the adventures of a young boy named Max (in the movie played by Max Records) who is sent to his room with no supper because he was "making mischief" in a wolf costume. Alone in his bedroom, a jungle grows out of his imagination. It is a land of scary-looking monsters. Max quickly conquers them with his feral look and is crowned their king. Yet, homesickness overcomes him and he returns to his bedroom where his parents and supper, still hot, is waiting for him.

Over 25 years ago, in one of the first efforts at CGI animation, Walt Disney Pictures tried to bring “Where The Wild Things Are” to the silver screen. Technology was not even close to the task, expensive to boot, and the project was dropped in the testing stage. A quarter of a century later director Spike Jonze felt up to the project. Jonze, a co-creator of “Jackass” and the director of some of the most creative music videos of the 1990s, has made two of the most creative and strangest films in recent years with Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Now most directors would have just turned his animators and computer programs loose, shot whatever actors were needed in front of a green screen, taken the paycheck, and gone home. Instead Jonze built giant foam puppets to represent the monsters and simply CGIed over the top of them to better represent facial expressions and more fluid movement. So, what Jonze decided to do was take four distinct processes, live action, CGI, animatronics, and suitmation, and combine them. All I can say is, thank God for Spike Jonze, who along with Tim Burton, the Polish brothers, and Darren Aronofsky, is creating some of the most interesting cinema going today. What he has done is incredible. While slow in places because it is a children’s story after all, Jonze has fleshed out and added on to the 48 page book. He has captured where the wild things grow.

Still part of me wonders if it a good idea for filmmakers to capture everywhere the wild things grow. Daniel Radcliffe is Harry Potter. Peter Jackson captured the shire where Frodo roamed. Every kid now knows what C.S. Lewis’s lion Aslan looks like. A little girl reading “The Golden Compass” now sees director Chris Weitz’s vision in her mind. The same goes for “Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events,” “A Secret Garden,” “Stuart Little,” and “Charlotte's Web.” The margins have been filled in and fleshed out. Is there anywhere a child’s imagination can still roam? One story, a room in a house, a filmmaker has not captured? Dreamers like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy changed our reality in the 1960s. They saw in their minds worlds that were not yet to be and asked why not. I guess that is why I am so concerned about our children’s imaginations. Where is the magic? Where is the dance? I want a world where children who dreamed where the wild things grow, grow up, and have the same imagination about what is possible today. Not the morbid generation of selfish worker bees who are killing the vision of our founding fathers. Let me know if you still dream of the wild things?

Verdict: A Great Children’s Story