Marcel Winatschek

Wild Things

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are never made it into my childhood—nobody read it to me, I never picked it up, and I appear to have grown up more or less intact despite this. But the trailer for Spike Jonze’s film adaptation did something to me anyway. You don’t need the childhood memory for it to land. The creature suits look physical and real, the kid looks genuinely lost inside his own feelings, and the whole thing carries this bruised, overcast emotional weather that I wasn’t expecting from a picture book about a boy in a wolf suit.

The American internet was already losing its mind over it. I found I couldn’t really blame them.