Movies that promise to make you feel like a kid again tend to overlook how miserable childhood can be.
Your friends and siblings might be mean. Your parents, especially if they're divorced, may feel absent. Your emotions routinely run riot. And the world often seems out of control. If being a kid is so much fun, why is it we all can't wait to grow up?
So when I say that Where the Wild Things Are, director Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's 1963 children's literary classic, breathlessly captures the turmoil and confusion of being nine years old, consider it as much a caution as a compliment.
This isn't a zany, faux-heartwarming slapstick comedy with adorable creatures and a plucky youngster at the centre.
It isn't the usual Hollywood affirmation of childish, selfish qualities, but a repudiation of them. It is sometimes harrowing, often dour and, for young children, possibly unsettling. In many ways, it feels like a movie, not for kids, but for the hipster parents who grew up on the beloved source material.
But there is this: The movie is also a marvel of inventiveness, visual acuity and frank, fresh performances.
As audacious experiments go, it is a flawed one, but unforgettably so.
Newcomer Max Records stars as Max, an energetic boy who feels misunderstood and neglected. After a fight with his mother, Max flees the family home until finding a sailboat that he uses to head out to sea.
He eventually finds himself on an island (actually locations on the Australian coast) populated by strange, enormous beasts. Once Max is anointed the new king of the wild things, the story consists of building forts, dirt fights and family feuds between wild things.
3.5 out of 5
