Where The Wild Things Are is a “classic children’s book” about nothing at all, really. Just a wild kid, who gets punished, and has a lot of imagination. That is about it. Pretty simple!
And man, his imagination is quite the party.
But theres more. Before he wears the wolf costume, and goes to wild land, Max (played by Max Records) is weird at shit. Starts snowball fights and cries when he loses. Then he bites his mom (Catherine Keener) and gets grounded. Then somehow, WILD LAND.
Lot of weird wild things, mostly looking like the books. And they all seem childish too. The “main one” was voiced by James Gandolfini.
So plot? Eventually Max becomes king, just by saying he is King mostly, and by lying. And he is bad at it. Eventually he is lonely and goes home. The end.
This movie is kind of fucked up. Not at all a kids movie. Kids might like it just because “Ooh, wild people!” in costumes doing stuff. But the kid in the movie is pretty damn near insane. He seemed psychotic to me. He is horrible at home, from what we see, and he is more horrible when he has no one to tell him what not to do. He even seems to laugh at the pain he ends up causing to the wild things.
The wild things are also screwy, they all are just depressed individuals. I am not sure what the movie is going for, but it is not a good feeling, that is for sure. It is very deep, and uncomfortable, and I hated it as it happened.
There is pain in his eyes.
By all means I may have missed the point, but this is definitely not a movie I was hoping to see a giant deeper meaning behind. The only reason I expect a better story from something like Transformers is that they have had series (namely Beast Wars) where about halfway through the first season, the writing in the show kicked it up a huge notch and became a work of art. But this went from kids book to movie, 50~ years later almost.
Just felt odd the whole time, and I did not have a good experience.