Jerry,

You don’t need a reason to post this piece of brilliance!

The tagline should be:

“You will believe a trailer can make you cry!”

Awesome. Just awesome.

Can’t wait. Even the trailer is a total tearjerker.

Fascinating.

If even the trailer is this powerful… can’t wait to see the movie.

iTunes has a short featurette about “Wild Things” with Maurice Sendak, and he loves the film.
Watching this, I can see why.

Yeah, I’ll stick with the book.

But if Sendak himself loves the movie who am I to argue.

This is a much better trailer than the first one.

I am put off by the irritating alternative (read: offkey crap) music used in both trailers.

H.R. Pufinstuf meets Burning Man. Yow! Ugly!

I’m glad you said it was “cg” instead of “animated,” which it seems not to be. Yikes.

music does all the work. play that song over clips of Sid and Marty Kroft’s H.R.Puffnstuff and you’ll cry too!

Doesn’t feel like “Wild Things” at all. Feels like some random typical new movie that borrows imagery from Wild Things. And the trailer music sucks. It’s all too Hollywood. It suffers from the Grinch effect: Superfluous backstory and contemporary cliched movie conventions pad the life out of the original, short, punchy book and iron it all smooth and dead. Of course, this is just the trailer…

Beady little human eyes and bulbous human noses covered with fur… Yuck! And look how dirty everything looks! The whole world is brown and dusty. As I watch that trailer I just think of how hard it is going to be for the kid’s mom to get all those skid marks out of his PJs! I think I saw Mayor McCheese in one of those quick cuts. Wanna bet we’ll see happy meals of these atrocities? Maybe they’ll redo the book and replace all the illustrations with stills from the movie. Dr Seuss is dead. He can’t help what’s done to his stuff. What is Sendak’s excuse?

Hey Stephen Worth –

Here’s a link to an “exclusive featurette” on WTWTA, on the apple trailer website.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/wherethewildthingsare/

The whole thing is mostly an interview with Maurice Sendak. He apparently is very supportive of Spike Jones’ vision of his story… I agree though that the designs they chose are pretty off-putting compared to the ones in the book.

Imagine that—a film that may actually live up to the author’s brilliance. In a little book I owned as a child and still own today there is page that identifies your “favorite things.” Listed in the space reserved for my favorite books, I had carefully inscribed, Donald J. Sobol’s “Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective” and Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.” The latter still being one of my favorite books. Both traillers look and “feel” wonderful. I can hardly wait to see the entire film.

Keeping in mind it’s just a trailer:

The book’s story is as basic an everychild fantasy of ultimate power/ wish fulfillment as can be.
Along with that it mainly owes its legendary status and popularity to the artwork of Sendak-even his trees and crosshatching have personality. His Max has believability and charm, although as drawn he’s more of a wizened imp than a “cute” little boy like the attractive live action kid actor. Sendak’s wide-mouthed, straw-haired, slightly evil-looking kids are more like Mary Blair’s abstractions (albeit in a different vein) than they are human.

The book has an appeal unique to illustration. I think it could have been made wonderfully in 2D, just as Tenniel’s Alice could have(although until recently the difficulty of that style in a feature would have been too high a hurdle). In this “puffed out”, human-cast and CG-monsters look, it’s just kind of ugly.

The book’s been out long enough that it belongs to generations of readers rather than to its author, and frankly what Sendak thinks of this film is his own business. It won’t affect me more than anyone else’s opinion will. This trailer doesn’t look to reflect much of the reasons I loved the book and think it’s a classic. But it has something that’s solid gold in the movie business: name recognition, so a slight short story-a picture book full of visual wonder is turned into a feature-length film. Come hell or high water.

And this is so unfortunate:
Max: “We could totally build a place like that!”. Dated dialogue in 3, 2….

Emo Kroft power hour…it works.

I saw this trailer yesterday and I thought they resurrected the art of full animatronics. The thought of that made me happy somehow, being a fan of Jim Henson and his Creature Workshop myself.

So it’s computer CGI…again…oh, well

Kids love to be scared in movies. It’s the dumb parents who think they can control everything their kids see and attempt to scare artists into limiting their intent.

oh. this is what happens when a long time hipster gets a hold of a beloved property, throws Lame soul-less indie rock on top of it along with a kid who can’t act and a bunch of fake “moments” between the characters. Yeah it feels like one big giant annoying music video from spike jonze. But that’s just the trailer, I’m sure the actual movie will be awesome! ;)

some of you are utterly disgusting. I hope you hate the movie and drown in your own bile you silly people. Like Maurice himself said, “Anyone who doesn’t like this movie can go to hell”

Animatio(and anyone else who is offended by a negative response): This is a trailer for a movie, and just like all other movies the people watching may like it, love it or hate it.

But whatever their reaction it doesn’t mean that they are bad or good people. It also doesn’t mean that the movie is itself objectively “bad” or “great”.

If you’ve seen it and love it, terrific! If you didn’t, that’s okay too.

This was posted specifically to get reactions from readers and, one imagines, a discussion of what’s either good bad or indifferent based on the trailer. The reactions seem pretty even either way, and there’s no more reason for me to ridicule anyone who enjoys or is touched by it any more than you should spew bile at people who find it unappealing. Don’t you think?

to all the haters…even if you don’t think this movie won’t be good (I personally think it will be amazing) it could of been a lot worse….hmm lets see the creatures could of been all CG, could of went goofy comedy route fart jokes and all. I realize I’m not holding the current movie industry up to high standards but you have to really cherish any good/great movie that comes out in todays sequel crazed money driven industry.

To me, this film seems to have ca. nothing in common with the children’s book, even though I think the monsters looks good. The book is poetic, but not sugarly sweet, as the film seems to be, according to this trailer. Instead, it has violent overtones. Both these and its children’s fantasy feel are captured way better in Oliver Knussen’s opera ‘Where The Wild Things Are”, which is highly recommended.

It looks okay, but the monsters just don’t have the appeal that they did in the book. They’re not cute or funny looking, just ugly.

I’m a Spike Jonze fan, and while I can understand some of the forced emotion and reliance of the music to give the trailer impact, I’m guessing the trailer is probably not going to be too representative of the movie as a whole. The movies Spike Jonze makes tend to be somewhat meandering and loose, so it’s hard to force that into the tight trailer format. It didn’t really work too well for Being John Malkovich (which I don’t really like) and Adaptation (which I thought was ace).

Also I would like to chime in on the music as well. I absolutely hate that they are using Arcade Fire to promote the Wild Things movie. It’s just a cheap grab to attract hipsters, as many have said, no bones about it. Arcade Fire is probably the penultimate empty hipster band… or they used to be almost 4 years ago. Back then you couldn’t say a bad word about Arcade Fire, with the denizens who read Spin and Rolling Stone autonomously telling you that you must see them live before you can even being to criticize them, yet now if you talked to the typical hipster with the stupid hair, they may not even know who Arcade Fire is, being replaced with the next fake-DIY soulless indie band on a small label which in reality is owned by Universal as stated in the terms of service.

Anyways, I’m hoping the Arcade Fire do not show up in the actual film. To note, Being John Malkovich had Brazil playing over the trailer (a few years before every CG film started doing that) and Adaptation had Under Pressure playing, neither of which appeared in either film. So hopefully this trend will follow and we can just enjoy an actual movie score.

Sean – what’s with the hatered towards ARCADE FIRE’s music outside of your own “anti-hipster” agenda here? What music would you have preferred? I think its a brilliant choice which actually IS representative of the movie as a whole – there seems to be a melancholy to this film greater than simply a kids book adaptation. The trailer feels like its selling this as a slightly tragic story of a lonely kid on the precipice of adulthood trying to escape growing up by immersing himself in a fantasy world. Considering the content of the actual song (if you listen to it and don’t pass judgement by labelling it “indie” and outside your interests) its anything but soulless and probably sets THE EXACT TONE of Eggers and Jonze’s narrative. Just shocked at the all around anger towards an intelligent interpretation and a consistent artistic vision vs. something like CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS. Looks awesome and I can listen to that music to those images all day long.

Alright, most of you here are artists; I assume anyway. Can any of you even remember how your imaginations worked as kids? I would have thought you did, but after reading a lot of the responses here I wonder….

The book that this movie is based on is about 40 pages long and contains about all of ten sentences.

The average adult sees a book like ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ and sees a picture book. Pictures and a few words. Distinctive art and so on and so forth. But when a kid looks at it through a kids eyes, and a kids mind, the pictures transcend their place on paper, much like Max’s room transcended it’s four walls, and become a world that only a child’s mind can see properly without straining. When we as people get older the world fills in the blanks for us. We know there aren’t monsters under our beds, or a snow covered forest behind the clothes in the wardrobe. Children haven’t had these facts filled in permanent ink yet; they’re only kind of scribbled in pencil.

That’s what made the book so special to me as a kid; it kind of spun you around blindfolded and shoved you off in a general direction; where you wound up was up to you and chance.

It is, to say the least, a bold undertaking to turn something like this into a movie. I readily admit that it lends itself to abuses of all sorts. And from what I’ve seen, read, and heard; it’s being done with an earnest honesty that astounds me.

I think what makes this movie so anticipated to me is it stirs the memory of when my mind still worked like that and the world was so much bigger; and anything could still happen. It’s that little feeling, little tickle in the back of my mind, that makes me create art to this day. It just strikes me as odd that this aspect has been mostly missed in the posts here.

PS:The music is irrelevant really, but for the sake of argument, I believe it fits the movie well. As far as hipsters go, I think some of the posters here need only go as far as the nearest mirror to find one.

It’s clear that each and every one of those who read the book in his/her childhood has his/her own way of seeing it, and gives his/her own interpretation, and has specific and unique feelings towards the book. So does Spike Jonze. So instead of accusing him, or producers or whoever else of how they got wrong the book, or how this is not what you imagined, or how it should have been a 2d animation or any other thing, I think it’s actually interesting to see how someone else sees ‘Wild Things’. Someone who can actually share his vision to millions of people. Maybe it could actually enrich your own vision of the book, who knows?

The book has an will always have a special place in my heart and, I’m sure, in the hearts of everyone else. But just because someone else sees it in a different way than you, it doesn’t mean that he’s ignorant or snob or whatever else. It’s his unique vision.

I will keep my love for the book the way it is, and in the same time I am really curious to see how Spike Jonze turned it in a cinematic form. And I can only respect and admire and have the warmest feelings for someone who, from the love for this very special book (in my opinion), has had the ambition and perseverance to deliver and share his own intimate and unique vision to other people.

Please don’t take this personal, this is just a gratuitous rant :) I think we have been conditioned to believe that an animated film is only good if every aspect is seemingly timeless. I disagree.

I once met a musician whining that classical music is the only thing in the world than can be called “music” because it is timeless. Everything else supposedly sucks because it is ephemeral.

In the 90′s, the only acceptable music for an animated films seemed to be an orchestral Alan Menken style, with the 5 annoying songs during the film, and a cheesy song over a full orchestra from a has-been singer during the credits. That was considered timeless, winning oscars and grammys, but today, only a few years later, it sounds like 90′s-animated-film-music.

I guess I prefer Arcade Fire to “timeless” music… *duck*