Certainly its marketing didn't position it as such: its trailers played more on the indie cred of Jonze, highlighting the soundtrack work by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and using a re-recorded version of Arcade Fire's big hit 'Wake Up', which doesn't appear in the film. There has been a fair amount of debate as to whether Where The Wild Things Are can be called a children's film. Fortunately, the results are very good, and while the film is by no means perfect, it remains a touching and compelling work. Spike Jonze is a director with a glowing reputation, but a seven-year gap between features isn't immediately reassuring. Maurice Sendak's 1963 book has become a classic in children's literature, beloved for generations and in various stages of development hell since the early-1980s. We find ourselves in precisely this predicament with Where The Wild Things Are.
Even if we overlook the general risk that the whole project may become a cynical Hollywood cash-grab, the director's vision may be so different to your childhood imaginings that it ends up tarnishing the original experience, perhaps permanently. This review is basically the same for both films.There's always a certain amount of trepidation when a filmmaker gets their hands on a book that you loved as a child. It's available on DVD with Higglety Pigglety Pop! on the same disc. Others may prefer to ignore the soundtrack and just watch. Yet another is that it's nearly impossible to understand the lyrics without turning on the subtitles (which thankfully are present most of the time) - comprehension is always a problem in opera, but it should have been possible to do better in a recording! So fans of mid-20th-century opera may appreciate the composition - though Knussen is certainly no Carlisle Floyd. Another is that the excellent vocalists end up screaming half the time because they are struggling so hard to find the pitch - which they accomplish but at the cost of attention to vocal quality. One result is that the music is immediately unappealing.
Oliver Knussen's music screams mid-century academic classical music, under the philosophy that if it sounds like anything familiar, it must be bad. The sets are similarly detailed and lovely. Visually it's as exciting as one would expect directly from Sendak: the costumes and motion evoke the whimsy and the beauty and the emotions that we see in Sendak's drawings. Where the Wild Things Are is an opera based on Maurice Sendak's book, with Sendak writing the opera libretto and doing the production design.
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