Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
Directed by Spike Jonze
Max imagines running away from his mom and sailing to a far-off land where large talking beasts—Ira, Carol, Douglas, the Bull, Judith and Alexander—crown him as their king, play rumpus, build forts and discover secret hideaways.
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What critics compared Where the Wild Things Are to
The main difference is, Swiss Army Man is much warmer to the touch, which (along with its wild natural setting and its air of childlike wonder) makes it more like a dirtier, more grown-up version of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are .
The wilderness where they find themselves is like the world of Where The Wild Things Are , packed with ornate decorated shelters handmade from sticks and rubbish transformed by the light and the make-believe games of the men into a beautiful idyll.
Like Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums , Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep , and Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are , Swiss Army Man is almost hermetically geared toward wayward souls who long to transcend their shared loneliness, even employing those directors' penchants for handmade built environments in order to communicate Hank's familiar but seemingly individuated ennui.
The music hilariously knocks that point home, with the Daniels practically spoofing the schoolyard jangle of Karen O’s Where The Wild Things Are score, while collaging in half-remembered lyrics from “Cotton Eye Joe” and snippets of the score from Jurassic Park.
Swiss Army Man begins like Cast Away, if Wilson (Tom Hank’s beach ball) were a talking corpse, but as the film begins to peel back the subjectivity it fails to take on the fable-like qualities of a relatively similar but vastly superior film like Where The Wild Things Are.
The grave yet whimsical tenor of the film is echoed perfectly in the score by Andy Hull and Robert McDowell of the Manchester Orchestra, which evokes the tang of magical realism imbued in “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” though what’s at stake here is more weighty and rooted in the earthly now.
Director Jeff Fowler is making his directorial debut here after having worked on the visual effects for films like “Where the Wild Things Are.” His best moments are when he breaks free from the film’s plot and has fun with the idea of Sonic.
But Jeff Fowler had an animation research job on “Where the Wild Things Are,” so he’s just happy to be here.
Sonic the Hedgehog features the directorial debut of Jeff Fowler, an animator whose credits include Where the Wild Things Are and a number of other projects as part of his company, Blur Studios, which he co-owns with Tim Miller, who recently directed Terminator: Dark Fate .
Newbie director Jeff Fowler (he was a visual effects artist and developer on Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are ) orchestrates the action rather well, a mid-movie set piece involving an escaping Sonic and Wachowski being chased by one of Dr. Robotnik’s massive robotic machines both imaginative and thrilling at the same time.
Unlike Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are," which tapped into the underlying melancholy driving the child's imaginative vision of menacing beasts, "The BFG" takes its events at face value and rarely manages to give them much depth.
When it comes to films that extend the length of original stories for the benefit of runtime we’ve seen both good examples (“Where the Wild Things Are”) and bad (“The Hobbit” trilogy).
On the other hand, however, the digitally enhanced crags and valleys of Giant Country have none of the reality of the jungle in Spike Jonze's uneven but very daring Where the Wild Things Are .
Viewed through these parameters, the film aligns itself with the likes of Spike Jonze’s heartbreaking adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are in that it’s an experience built to invoke large, abstract ideas rather than cohere into a precise narrative.
A mix of C.G.I. spectacle and heavy emotional drama, director J.A. Bayona’s film, based on Patrick Ness’s novel, occasionally feels like one of those arty children’s movies that earn awards and acclaim—Where the Wild Things Are, or the revered Pan’s Labyrinth (which isn’t really a children’s movie).
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In these moments, Lowery evokes everything from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to Where the Wild Things Are to Prometheus .
Hope can be found in the friendship between Okja and Mija, channelling other inter-species bonds as seen in ET and Maurice Sidak's Where the Wild Things Are.
Moonrise Kingdom feels like a combination of Where the Wild Things Are and last year’s Submarine , only on much softer terms.
Go see this movie and revel in the innocence it portrays (shades of the dismal "Where the wild things are" in the backdrop).
There were two bad roads the Wild Things movie could potentially go down: the Cat in the Hat road (a grievous debasement of the source text with a big-name comedian in latex makeup delivering some awful, slangy "updating" of Seussian language) or the Charlotte's Web road (a literary adaptation in the decorous mode, respectful of the original but sentimentalized and bland).
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The entire enterprise is so bloated, in fact, that this could well be the first film since "Where the Wild Things Are" where it takes less time to read the book than it does to see the movie that it inspired and in that case, the book was only ten sentences long.
On an adaptation level, though, Barbie is the boldest take on a “children’s” property since Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are .