Where the Wild Things Are: Creatures of Comfort

If you have ever complained that CGI is ruining special effects, ever pined wistfully for the days of latex and puppets, hear this: you are not alone. Cinematic creatures have undergone a disturbing revolution since the golden days of Peter Jackson and George Lucas, who captured our hearts with miniatures, puppets, animatronics, and simple in-camera tricks, only to betray us in the new millennium with irritations like Gollum and Jar Jar Binks. All of our American masters of the special effects feast—Jackson, Lucas, Spielberg, Zemeckis—have all fallen the way of the pixel, and left us wondering if we’ll ever again have cinematic creatures that look like palpable beings made of matter, instead of the computerized specters we choke down.

This dominating force of CGI-oriented fantasy films was met by a small subculture of filmmakers who made deliberately lo-fi works. Let’s call them the handmaids of handmade, directors like Michel Gondry (always just a handshake away from Jonze) and Wes Anderson celebrate all that is handmade and colloquial in nostalgic movies like Science of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind, The Royal Tenenbaums, and a slew of music video animations made from Legos, fabric, and paper cut outs.

But there had to be a middle way, and Spike Jonze, director of Where the Wild Things Are, has found it—an elegant blending between costumes, sets, puppetry, and CGI that will put the $500 million computer world of Avatar to shame. Jonze shot the entirety of the film using live action Wild Things in costume, and then used CGI as a tool to create facial expressions instead of replacing them bodily with binary code. (Anderson adopted a similar approach in the animation of his forthcoming feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox). The effect is believable—it’s apparent that Max isn’t just reacting to a tennis ball on a stick, and this element of realism makes all the difference. The only thing left to choke down are a few shoddy motivations in the story that has Dave Eggers written all over it.

We’re all familiar with Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book about Max, the misbehaving boy who is sent to bed without supper and finds his way to the land of the Wild Things, but in Jonze and Eggers’ expansion of the picture book, Max’s imagined world molds to his psyche, and his wild emotions manifest in the Wild Things. The story is endearing and startlingly honest about the sadness and anger that childhood can foster, but the story also suffers from the aforementioned lack of motivation. The viewer blinded by the sweetness and beauty of the story would rationalize that a child’s fantasy isn’t necessarily motivated, and they would be right, but this is not the material that makes an excellent story. Dave Eggers doesn’t know this, but he has millions of dollars and a bestselling book so gets to produce scripts like these. Luckily, holes in the narrative are filled by the most astonishing images of the year, with surprising cinematography that doesn’t shy away from violence, and sprawling, authentic locations that are so clear and rich they expose the bare fantasy worlds of The Golden Compass and The Chronicles of Narnia for the greenscreen simulations they really are.

The actual production of Wild Things was reportedly a freeform experiment in its own right. Jonze tried not to call cut, rolling out on forty-minute takes with a second pre-loaded camera standing by to take its place. The majority of the cinematography was handheld, which is nearly unprecedented for a movie set to be digitally manipulated, but it freed the frame to explore the point of view of an actual kid, without the structure and unreality of telescoping crane-cams and dolly shots. Max Records, the actor in the lead role, often wore a microphone in his ear through which Jonze would whisper direction or play music to capture the tumult of a boy at play. Perhaps all of these indulgences in process are how the production budget ballooned to hundred million dollars. You get what you pay for.

It isn’t perfect but its faults are few and they are eclipsed completely by the arresting imagery, and surprisingly honest revisiting of childhood that doesn’t hide behind niceties but still lets the joy of playing shine through. –Christianne Hedtke

Director: Spike Jonze
Writers: Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers