A young boy enrages his mother and then goes to the island where the wild things are.
A lot of craftsmanship certainly went into making this movie. The screenplay is carefully balanced, the shots are interesting and original, the wild things are wonderful… but in the end what a boring movie!
See the problem is that this movie is adapted from a very famous illustrated children book, where the wilds things are, which is ten sentences long. Now with all the skills in the world is simply not possible to adapt ten sentences in a ninety minutes movie without leaving an after taste like a very watery soup.
Therefore all the carefully constructed scenes looks interesting the first time but when we see that young Max is a lonely boy, again, and again, and again, in get unnerving. We want the story to move on but there is not enough story so everything takes a bloody long time to get done.
This really ruins what could be an interesting movie. All the psychological flavor in the world is not enough when nothing interesting is happening.
On the plus side the director, Spike Jonze, had a very public fallout with the studio about how to realize the wild things and I heartily commend his decision to go the “person in a suit” route. They look incredibly more physical than the usual CGI stuff, which is wisely still used for facial animations, and give the story a mesmerizing fairy tale look which reminded me of “Labyrinth”.
If only they could have made it less than an hour long….
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