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Call of the Wild: Where the Wild Things Are and the Spike Jonze Enigma


‘Let the wild rumpus start!’ shouts Max, the newly crowned king of the Wild Things and his imaginary world beyond. Let the anticipation cease, sigh audiences, as Spike Jonze’s long awaited adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children's book unfurls on cinema screens this month. Max, played by Max Records, literally wrestles with Jonze’s camera in the opening seconds of Where the Wild Things Are. With blurring speed and ferocious growls, Max and the Wild Things are the culmination of almost a decade of halted filmmaking, tireless story telling and the delicate care of one legendary children’s book in the hands of one of modern cinema’s most explosive directors. But with eloquence and trademark deviation in technique Jonze pulls it off. In fact, he goes further than that, he creates a world of fiction and obvious imagination and invites us to step inside, for just 100 minutes, and see some of the wildest filmmaking of all. 

The weird and wonderful back catalogue of Spike Jonze may rack up numerous music videos, commercials, short films, as well as two feature films, but his latest call of the wild is a heart-swelling display of beautiful imperfections, and highlights that Spike Jonze doesn’t bring precision to the set, but instead a fiercely jagged finesse for truthful filmmaking. For all it’s worth, counting just the preempted excitement that has surrounded this adaptation is enough to knight it as a success. Add to that the respective brilliance of writer Dave Eggers, not to mention the exuberance of Catherine Keener and Max Records, and an equally paced and placed score by Karen O; you end up with an approach that conjurers the wildest of curiosity. All part of the enigmatic Spike Jonze excellence, right?

Rewind to a time when Spike Jonze wasn’t pooling all his creative prowess into one pot. The 1990s saw Jonze produce more than fifty music videos for musicians like Beastie Boys, Weezer, Björk and Daft Punk, not to mention later feature films like Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation. (2002). The images of the new skate culture infiltrating television sets, and the faces of music promos and commercials being twisted and warped, and at times thrown out of the window, signified the underground breaking through the surface. And the Jonze aesthetic was the ultimate inspiration. Here was a ferociously electric filmmaker with a mysteriously sharp edge to him. A rough characteristic that blew smoke in the face of the pedantic and vented the haze surrounding youth culture.  

It is somewhat surprising to see a director like Spike Jonze, considering all he has achieved, discuss his career and the moments that projects take off as either, “yeah I just called him up”, or, “yeah he just sent me a letter”. But from exchanging a few words after his talk at the BFI last weekend, and getting a pair of horns and teeth scribbled across a picture of Carol (James Gandolfini), articulated a director that people genuinely can look up to. Unlike the Hollywood powerhouses, Jonze barely touches on being a director. Instead he prefers talking about the stories behind projects, his friend loudly talking on the phone during a play, and funnily, what his favourite on-set sandwich was. Also, it seems that being a director that cannot be tracked and tied to one landmark piece of work is Jonze’s wildest trait. From his work on the Beastie Boys video for Sabotage, which saw a cop show parody meet home-video foolishness, to his work on the opening scene of Fully Flared (2007), which saw a skate park - a regular stomping ground for Jonze - explode as skaters interacted with it. It is clear to see the Jonze watermark appearing in these under the radar approaches to filmmaking. But with the myth and rumor that has orbited Where the Wild Things Are for the past few years, could this be a hurdle to Jonze’s modest yet vibrant filmmaking approach? Or will the wild rumpus carry through the days and nights of filmmaking movements to come?

The earliest stages of production for Where the Wild Things Are date back to the late 1980s, almost a decade before the lead Max Records was even born. These stages saw two failed attempts to produce animated adaptations of Sendak’s book, and until the late 1990s the prospect looked slim. Years later, after Jonze turned down the offer of adapting fellow screenwriter Dave Eggers’ novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he re-approached Eggers asking if he would like to write an adapted screenplay for Where the Wild Things Are under Warner Brothers’ supervision.


Sendak’s original 48 page book about a mischievous boy, Max, who is sent to his room without supper and finds himself dreaming through an imagined wilderness inhabited by the Wild Things, seems like a perfect recipe for Jonze to embrace. The concept of merging the real with the fantasy with humble experimentation is undeniably present in so many of Jonze’s works. Not only did Dave Eggers collaborate on a screenplay with Jonze, he also wrote a 270-page novel to accompany it. In the acknowledging pages of The Wild Things, Eggers explains that his book drifts away from the film’s narrative in parts, and stays close in others. He explains some early thoughts of Jonze’s, those being that he wanted the story to expand on Sendak’s book, but to follow the life of a boy from a divorced upbringing. This separation in the story that Sendak explored was better illustrated by the divided relationship between Max and his off-page mother. However, in Jonze’s adaptation, this clash of understanding between Max and his mother Connie, played by Catherine Keener, is mitigated by the missing father in Max’s life.

We first see Max building an igloo in the heaps of snow opposite his house, and quickly he rushes to show his construction to his disinterested teenage sister, Claire. From the get-go we know that Max has few friends to share his creativity with, and thus introduces the inevitability of his thoughts escaping to the land of the Wild Things. As Max struggles to come to terms with his primitivity and wild attitude not sinking in with his family, he retaliates, and through a burst of fear bites his mother. After this he launches out of the front door of his house and charges through a nearby wooded area, finally arriving at his town’s waterfront. Climbing inside a small sailing boat Max drifts off from the shore and the glistening lights of civilization disappear form his view. A slightly altered take on Sendak’s morphing bedroom imagery, but equally as powerful. Jonze utilizes a hand-held and jumpy editing model for synthesizing the images of reality and daydream, so that, although Max’s world is implied to exist inside his mind, it is conceived in a believable series of edits that flow seamlessly from home to fantasy.

Sendak’s work still manages to stay present through the film. Jonze’s most prominent trend in the film is his use of objects in Max’s real life, that act as catalysts in his journey with the Wild Things. Sendak used bedposts and wallpaper to transform Max into the woods and shrubbery of his wild imagination. Jonze works with Max’s loss in his parents divorce, and uses objects given to him by his father, or moments of retaliation against his mother, to control the lives of the Wild Things and their habitat. The Wild Things (voiced by James Gandolfini, Paul Dano, Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker and Chris Cooper) are a complex projection of how vast, colossal and powerful a child’s mind is. Max’s burst of fear and adrenaline towards his mother and her boyfriend, and his spontaneous charge towards the sea, immediately compliments François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), when Antoine Doinel escapes the rigor of his boarding school for a chance to glance at the ocean. And it is not just this that jumps out from Jonze’s direction; moments of chaos and destruction bring back images from as distant as Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite (1933), and up to the beloved antics of a young Macaulay Culkin in John Hughes’ Home Alone (1990).

The imperfections that are intrinsic to a Jonze project, no matter what scale or budget, refortify his attention to the emotional details, rather than the material. And his understanding of the natural faults in human relationships and the irrational misjudgments made in moments of anger are articulated flawlessly. However, Where the Wild Things Are uses a considerable amount of CGI, at times this works and is integrated into the organic tempo of the film, usually in the animated faces of the Wild Things. But at other times it stands out too dominantly, even amongst the Wild Things, and detracts the essence of imagination, offering a somewhat contrived aesthetic to the rumpus of Max and the Wild Things. The adaptation process too causes small fractures in the flow of the film. Jonze and Eggers show ingenuity and resourcefulness with their elaborated illustration of Sendak's simple story; through the masterful inclusion of objects and symbols in Max's reality transforming the nature of his personified dreams. However, this concept, one brilliantly conceived, is often overplayed leaving a sense of predictability towards the closing stages of Max's strivings for a wild world that sympathises and understands him, contrasting that of his off-kilter home life. 

It would be completely unjustified to disregard the film's integrity on the the slight drops it so naturally was destined to take. Jonze and Eggers, and their impeccable ensemble of co-creators, are what lifts Where the Wild Things Are high above the meek dwellings of a film too afraid to truly adapt its source material. And it further surpasses the glorified and sensationalised model of modern children's films. Much discussion surrounds Jonze's film, like it surrounded Sendak's book, about whether it can actually be considered a children's film. Well, no it can't. And it shouldn't try to. Jonze, now in his forties, spent the majority of his thirties trying to adapt a book he revisited in his twenties that meant so much in his childhood. It is a life's work whichever way it's viewed. Through the wild rumpus, the crowing of a king and the return to reality; Spike Jonze still appears to stand tall. Only this time he has a groundbreaking film that isn't afraid to roar its terrible roar, gnash its terrible teeth and show its terrible claws - whether to its fans or its critics.


Jamie Isbell
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