Planner Reads

Is Where the Wild Things Are too scary for kids?

Maybe. But that’s exactly why they should see it. Over at Newsweek.com, I wrap up Wild Things week with an essay about how Spike Jonze and directors like him are defying our culture of coddling and restoring some much needed danger and disobedience to children’s stories. An excerpt:

The standard line now is that by letting Jonze make Wild Things largely his way—as a movie “about childhood” rather than “for children”—the studio has abandoned (or frightened off) the audience that Sendak’s story was originally supposed to reach: actual kids. In the film, Max is in near-constant danger. Older boys collapse his handmade igloo with him inside; a monster almost knocks him off a cliff in the midst of a rumpus; claws, dirt clods, and falling trees barely miss his head; and the neurotic, melancholy Wild Things—which are very real-looking nine-foot-tall puppets—go from wanting to hug him to wanting eat him without much warning. What’s more, there’s little plot to hook distractable young minds—just a moody, inchoate ramble across an alien landscape. It’s not, in other words, what “happens at the end” that’s causing controversy. It’s the idea ...