Where the wild things are, where the beauty lays.
Wow. This film is utterly gobsmacking, im so glad i wasn't disapointed by this but then again from every aspect of its design and pre-production it was obviously going to be the piece that it is. However i am a perfectionist and there were, tiny elements that i would change, but then, i've never seen a film that i wouldn't and i suppose every other film-makers the same, its how we would make something our own. don't get me wrong however, Jonze completely out did himself on this and i could never make anything close, if you were to come to me and say, right make a adapation of the wild things i would do it purely on my own imagination, go to a beautiful forest, film a bit on the lake and try to create something like that but i suppose i would have to focus purely on location rather than the actual wild things because without the budget its impossible right? but yeah the bits that so harshly pulled me out of the cinematic experience when your sucked into the film were the cgi. There were too many bits like on the rocks when you just knew it wasn't real, and im thinking this is where they slipped up. it's not even crucial elements it just bugged me. But even with tiny aspects like that the film still stunned me. With other things like kidulthood when they fuck up on continuity or there's a tiny bit in the scripting it will put me right off the film and the whole respect for the creativity has gone down hill but with where the wild things are i still couldn't help but fall in love with it. I'd love to meet someone who didn't like it, i honestly can't see how it would be possible. it was beautiful and it will become iconic, im sure in a another 10years they will re-do and it will be so real in other aspects but they whole artistic angle will be gone.
There would so many bits in this that just made me smile, it pulled me into my own childhood experiences and started making me desire this story could be real in a way i could never have believed possible with the original book, Sendak created perhaps a more darker look to the story and jonze pulled it out, made overly real but familar characters and brightened up the whole thing and it made me smile, seeing the wild things just made you want to hug them and with karen O's soft vocals and tinkling piano beats throughout you couldnt help but get lost in the magic. i found it more straight forward then i thought it would be. Claires character through me out of context originally, purely as i dont like characters with my name, (weird i know but an audience associates themselves with different characters in a film and when you have the same name or other characteristics your forced to associate yourself with them and i didn't like the character, i found her totaully irrelvant) Others may say she is a crucial character but i have to disagree, we already know max, we've fallen in love with him straight off from his vivid imagination and his cute but strange all in one suit. I would of scrapped the character of claire from it, the scene where his igloo gets broken down could of been done differently and i know its a recurring theme when he mimics the snowball fight with the wild things are his whole fascination with forts, is obviously a crucial aspect just that the audience can associate ourself's with, every child builds forts, and every one has them torn down or has to grow out of it but im sure, in every one of us that there are some days where we all wish we could build a fort, full of beautiful things that mean something to us and cut us self off from the world, and no one, would touch it. the character carol mentions in the film about what a fort was to him and with the introduction to the two owls he hated anything that threatened him in his own place of safety. Where the wild things are for me created a whole illusion of a fort, i guess this is why you must see it at a cinema, its surreal, comforting, daunting and beautiful in all the same ways, it drags you into a false sense of security and then when the disillusion of a child's lie is crushed and found out it's utterly heart breaking.
Just got to watch this one again.
