A 10-sentence picture book became a full-length feature film, which meant someone had to invent an entire emotional world that Maurice Sendak never wrote down.
The Book
Where the Wild Things Are
by Maurice Sendak
The Film
Where the Wild Things Are
Directed by Spike Jonze, 2009
🔀 What Changed
Sendak's 1963 book is barely 338 words, so screenwriters Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers had to build nearly everything from scratch. The film gives Max a fractured home life, with a working single mother and an absent father, none of which appears in the book. Each Wild Thing is given a distinct name and personality, most notably Carol, whose volatile temper and attachment to Max become the film's emotional center, expanding a wordless illustration into a full character arc. The film also adds a specific inciting incident, a fight with Max's mother's boyfriend, that motivates his escape, replacing the book's dreamlike, unexplained transition into the forest.
🎙️ What the Author Said
Sendak was closely involved and publicly supportive of the adaptation. In interviews around the film's 2009 release, including one with NPR, he praised Jonze's approach and said he trusted him completely with the material, reportedly telling anxious parents worried the film was too intense that if they thought their child couldn't handle it, that was the parents' problem, not the film's.
“If your kid can't handle it, then don't bring him.”
One version is a 10-sentence picture book, the other a 101-minute meditation on childhood rage. Cast your vote below.
