Willet argues that a good storyteller “knows that kids have many difficult feelings, as well as feelings that adults have forgotten about,” and so does not shy away from dark material.
Jonze and Eggers have fought hard for five years to retain the more troubling content in Where The Wild Things Are. Eggers received repeated notes from concerned producers about the screenplay. “There is a whitewashed, idealized version of childhood that is popular in movies. It has the kids sitting neatly in their chairs, talking with some adult, in a sarcastic, overly sophisticated but polite way — a concoction that bears no resemblance to an actual kid,” he explains.
In defense of the new film, Michael Phillips, critic for the Chicago Tribune, has argued that it is grown-ups who are more disturbed by its darkness.
“I suspect kids will go for it more than their parents; in my experience, it’s parents who tend to get fussed up about material they perceive, often wrongly, as ‘too dark’ or difficult. There’s a certain amount of pain in Where the Wild Things Are, but it’s completely earned. The movie fills you with all sorts of feelings, and I suspect children will recognize those feelings as their own,” he writes. In an article in this month’s edition of the journal The Psychologist, psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb argues that this book and other works by Sendak are “fascinating studies of intense emotions — disappointment, fury, even cannibalistic rage — and their transformation through creative activity.”
The book of Where the Wild Things Are, which Sendak also illustrated, sees Max sent to bed without dinner after misbehaving. He then sails across an ocean encountering the hairy monsters of the title. When Max returns home, his dinner is waiting and is still warm. According to Gottlieb, the story tackles many common childhood fears. “In straightforward, undisguised fashion, Sendak’s work has addressed problems as monumental for children as being in a rage at mother, relating to a depressed or emotionally unavailable mother, or coming to terms with a mother who cannot or will not recognize her child’s concerns or state of mind,” he writes. “He manages nonetheless to maintain the optimistic view that all these troubles can be tamed, even if not fully overcome, through imagination. The ultimate magic of his work resides in his presentations of imagination, dream, fantasy and — ultimately — art itself as sources of resilience, of the strength to soldier on.”
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