Review by Kerry Bush

As demonstrated by films like Twilight, Eragon, and various Dr. Seuss classics, most children's movies that are made based on children's books don't turn out to be very good. However, Where the Wild Things Are breaks this stereotype. Although it's a lot darker than advertisements lead people to expect, Wild Things manages to stay true to the book off of which it was based while still providing the viewer with a lot to think about. Wild Things is full of symbolism and parallels to real life that are difficult for even the most passive of us to ignore.

The film starts out with the main character, a young child named Max, having a rough day at home. He gets in a snowball fight with his older sister and her friends and ends up getting his snow fort knocked down-something many of us can relate to having gone through as a child.

He bites his mother and runs away from home, where he travels across the sea to the island where the wild things live. There he meets some scary-but-friendly monsters who name him king, saying, "You will be a truly great king." However, Max has some trouble with this because even though he means well, he has difficulty keeping the peace. Monsters get jealous of one another, and there even seems to be some romantic tension when one monster named KW keeps on leaving the group to go hang out with her new friends Bob and Terry.

Carol, Max's favorite monster and best friend (the favoritism of King Max is another tension-causer) gets jealous of them because he seems to have a little bit of a crush on KW. This parallels the home life of Max himself. He and his sister Claire are being raised by a divorced mother who just got a new boyfriend and Max is jealous of said boyfriend because in the beginning of the movie his mother is paying more attention to him than she is to Max. This is just one of the many ways in which the place where the wild things reside is similar to real life.

Every child wants to have power, but the film shows that power is a lot more difficult to handle than it may seem. Max becomes king immediately upon arriving on the island, and the pressure is on him to keep the peace. He says he has a shield that will keep out all the sadness, and the wild things believe him. (It's very interesting: the wild things believe anything Max says. That's one thing that gives him the power he has over them. And haven't all children wanted to have someone believe their stories? There's one more way the land of the wild things is a dream come true for Max.)

This shield, though, doesn't quite work. Sadness still enters the colony as the story progresses and because the wild things trust Max as much as they do they start to get upset.

One thing leads to another and eventually Max leaves the island to return home (where, as the book says, supper is still hot). It's not the happiest ending, but it is rife with meaning. No matter how great things are, they can't stay that way forever-sadness hits all of us no matter how hard we try to avoid it.

And that, I believe, is one of the main points of Where the Wild Things Are. Childhood is wonderful, but it doesn't last forever and trying to make it do so will only make it harder when things actually do have to change.