Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

[A Boy Named Seo]

Anyone seen it yet? I really want to.

[Vic Sage]

yes.
It's alot tougher, less sentimental about childhood than you'd think.
Fascinating movie, really.
In its direct tapping into the subconscious nightmare of childhood, its like a family movie by David Lynch. Which has its plusses and minuses.

[A Boy Named Seo]

A family movie by David Lynch makes me wanna have a kid. I'm going to see it as soon as the crowds thin a little.

[A Boy Named Seo]

That was a dark, kinda fucked up movie. I'm supposing his parents divorce is what made the kid so angry, but he was scary angry, so I wondered if there was more there. The monsters, how they each seemed to represent a little of Max, was really well done.

[TransMonk]

Finally saw this last night...I agree, it was an interesting interpretation of the book.

Not a great movie, but interesting and visually beautiful. I love that that this movie had guys in suits and saved the CGI solely for the faces of the monsters. Much more real to me.

[Edgy MD]

Oddly enough, Disney's first attempt at experimenting with computer-generated feature animation was an adaptation of

?

It was 1983, and Disney was making good decisions at the time, and they fortunately decided the technology wasn't yet up to carrying the artisitic vision forward.

Lead animator on that test project was Glen Keane, aka "Billy" from The Family Circus.

[Guest LeiterWagnerFasterStrongr]

Arresting. Unsentimental, as Vic said... but with a real sense of wonder and (almost unbearable) sadness. Which is a really tough trick to pull off. But Spike Jonze's team-- including Dave Eggers on screenwriting duty-- does it.

And yes, it's gorgeous-- the CGI blends seamlessly with the scenery, and the costumes give the monsters a heft that helps make them more real, not just physically, but as "characters".

In different hands, I could easily see this being, say, an even more visually stunning mess (Michel Gondry), or a more lively but forgettable narrative with roughly this same tone... but not nearly the resonance (Alfonso Cuaron, say, or the guy who did the last Harry Potter). Instead, it may be the most honest movie about growing up that I've ever seen, really.

[metirish]

Turned this off after an hour, just didn't find it all that interesting.

[RealityChuck]

Duller than dishwater. Obviously, they had to add a lot of fill, but it's all fill. The wild things are about as wild as a sleeping kitten, and the entire story, such as it is, is tedious and obvious, even for a third grader. The wild things looked like those in the book, but had nothing else going for them.