by Brian Luehr

Where the Wild Things Are is an epic tale with an awesome plot, compared to the eleven or ten sentence children’s book.  I believe the plot was very well developed although some parts seemed kind of iffy.  The movie starts out with this boy named Max who is a really crazy kid, and one day he loses his temper and throws a tantrum.  He then proceeds to run away from his place of dwelling, and he hops on a boat and begins his grand exploration.  This boat takes him to an island completely inhabited by extremely emotional wild things.  Let me emphasize that.  They were really emotional.  Max then becomes their therapist, kind of.  He tries to help them out with their really bizarre emotional behaviors.  Some of the wild things seem almost suicidal.  Aside from the emotional parts there are some really funny scenes of the wild things just doing crazy stuff.  There are scenes of them jumping on each other and another scene when they have a huge dirt clod fight.  But one hilarious part for me was when one wild thing went into an anger fight and ripped the arm off of another wild thing, and don’t worry, the wild thing was not hurt too badly.  This movie is entirely one big metaphor for the life of Max.  For instance the big leader of the wild things is Carol, and Carol is a representation for Max when he is having a temper tantrum.  I believe (even though it is kind of tough to get) that Spike Jones directed an awesome movie and I will give it 5.4 stars out of  7.