Since cinema began in the late ninteenth century, it has relied heavily on adapting existing media to the screen. It makes a great deal of sense, if you enjoyed a book it is hard not be excited when you hear that it is coming to the big screen (or - if you procrastinate too much and forget to go - the small screen). It's also arguably easier (but also arguably harder) than creating an original story, so the appeal is certainly there. This began with bringing plays and novels to celluloid, but has expanded over time (when a great product has come along, or the studios were feeling particularly lazy) to include television, toys, video games, comic books, songs, and bizarrely, theme park rides (I want to ask the person who thought that making Pirates of the Carribean into a movie was a good idea and ask them how they ever managed to convince a studio to do it, but he's probably too busy swimming in money to take my calls).
Adapting other mediums to film has always been a tricky affair. In many ways this is largely due to differences in length. A full length novel is sometimes too long, which can result in scenes being cut, characters being merged or dropped, or plot details changed due to timing requirements. On the other hand a short story can be far too short. The short story "The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway was adapted into a film in 1950 (funnily enough, called "The Killers") which opened with a word by word faithful translation of the short story, followed by an almost entirely unrelated film that they made up, adding a certain looseness to the term "adaptation". This was taken even further in the adaptation of the long running Mario Bros game series, which kept the names, and... actually that's about all they kept, in a plot that was otherwise unrelated, but with familiar titles from the series applied to unfamiliar objects.
Mind you, this works both ways, with novelisations of films getting fatter with newly added scenes that don't always flow well with the existing plot, (the main crime here is giving an internal monologue to characters that really didn't need one), and video games that contain a lot more shooting than was ever in the film (I don't recall Marty McFly doing quite so much jumping between floating platforms in Back to the Future part 2, but there you go).
Spike Jonze's adaptation of the children's picture book "Where The Wild Things Are" faces an issue because the source on which it is based is only 40 or so pages long, and only about 5-10 words on each page, meaning a near two hour film needs to be created out of only 400 words. Also, while it is undeniably a children's classic, it can't be denied that not a whole lot happens in it. It can be crudley summarised as "Boy gets sent to room, disappears on adventure (as you do), meets a whole lot of monsters and basically goes all British Empire on their arses, and then goes home and has dinner."
Now, there is far more to the story than this, and I have adored this story ever since I was five, but in terms of actual concrete events, this is about all that happens. So when adapting such a brief novel, the two choices appear to be "Make up a lot of extra stuff so more happens" or "do not much. Very, very slowly." So which did Where the Wild Things Are choose?
As it happens, both.
Where the Wild Things Are the film follows the basic premise of the story, but fleshes out a lot of the elements. Max (Our hero/strange kid) is now given a family and some reason for his behavior, and his encounter with the Wild Things expands to a full rise and fall of a kingdom. Each of the Wild Things has been given a separate personality and archetype, and now appear to embody certain characteristics of Max himself. There's the fun loving but easily enraged, the shy and low self esteem, the hard done by and put upon. All of Max's childlike facets are personified and expanded to alarming levels, until he is unable to cope with the results they produce.
However, there is still not a lot of plot to go around and many scenes cannot be given a clear and definitive action, instead only able to be summarised as "Max and the Wild Things run around a lot and have fun/are sad/are angry/tear each other's arms off, etc. etc." This means that the film is very slow at times, and in many cases functions more as a mood piece than as a traditional story. What it does do well, perhaps better than any other film, is capture the feeling and the logic of being a child. In the film, when things are good, things are very good, it's happy and everything goes well, with amazing plans and great adventures. But sometimes things happen. People get mad, and they get mad or angry for no other reason than that they do. There is a certain helplessness that comes accross, where the universe just doesn't go as planned, and there is nothing to be done.
It also features an ending that while satisfactory, is only so up to a point, but I suspect this is by design. It doesn't actually solve the problems presented in the story, these will still be there. But just for tonight, right now, everything is ok.
It's a thought provoking film, but in the end it doesn't quite succeed in telling a succinct and engaging story for the full duration, as its slow pace and brief plot leave long areas without substance.
Rating 3 out of 6.
- As a side note, I have changed the rating from out of 5 to out of 6, as with an odd number it is too easy to label every film as 3 out 5, neither good or bad. This way every film reviewed is either slightly good or slightly bad to lend a little more practicality to the proceedings.
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