I hope it works. The creature shop worked on it and I always had them in mind to do the wild things as they kind of look like big,ugly, hairy beast like Sweetums.

Jerry,

I am shocked that this wasn’t a Henson project. I’ve always been such a fan of their work. But what I’m seeing here looks to be very Hensonesque? Looking forward to this one. ((crosses fingers))
Awesome talent involved in this film. EXCITING PROJECT TO LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING.

Thanks for posting this!

The faces are CG animated, but I’m seeing this either way, it looks to set the standard for how family movies SHOULD be and used to be before everything got intensely Disnified in the 90s with incessant singing and stupid pop culture jokes. Spike Jonze is a great director anyways.

Hate the music on the trailer though.

YESSS

weird, I don’t remember the book being long enough for film. It looks nice though.

Wow. That looks like the live action “Little Prince” musical. Which was also awful. Jonze couldn’t direct himself out of a paper bag.

Oh my god. Finally — Dave Eggers + Spike Jonze + Maurice Sendak + Arcade Fire? Wow. Looks stunning.

Spike Jonze….yup, this should be fairly amazing!!!!!

First there was the hit stage musical “Avenue Q” and now this. The Henson Company is to this decade what Disney was to the early 1980’s in that everyone BUT them is doing proper Henson projects.

“First there was the hit stage musical “Avenue Q” and now this. The Henson Company is to this decade what Disney was to the early 1980’s in that everyone BUT them is doing proper Henson projects.”

Well, the frog is working with mouse now and I think this project will work. And don’t start bashing the frog either. He’s seems to get back on track after the OZ problm.

This is going to be amazing. Perfect music choice for the trailer. From what i’ve seen so far the spirit of the book looks like it has been captured perfectly

Looks more like. “Where the Independent Films Are”

I have high hopes there won’t be a shred of cynicism in this film OR pop culture jokes. We need a film like that.

This looks wonderfully charming. I love the subtlety of it all- no overly saturated colors, occasionally surreal sets, and the designs of the wild things look exactly like their original counterparts. I’m hoping this turns out well.

First off, this looks wonderful and I’m very excited. But there’s one thing worries me.
Jonze’ commercial work has been so heavily plaguerised that every commercial of the last 8 years (in the UK anyways) has looked like this. I really don’t want to be sat through this movie going “yeah, that’s nice n’all, but it looks like an Orange commercial.”

I’ll probably get a call tommorow asking me to make an advert that looks like this, mind you. sigh…

the wild things look like tele-tubbies.

Absolutely fantastic.

The characters are spot on and I can see why Spike Jonze didn’t want to fully animate them. This is right up there with Shane Acker’s “9″ on my most anticipated films of ‘09.

I also cannot see how anyone could hate the music in the trailer. The Arcade Fire is a fantastic band and Wake Up is easily one of their best tracks.

Well, 2009 for me is a write-off, as I’m going to spend the whole year looking forward to this film now. Looks amazing! I have the animated version and the book… Maybe there’ll be a whole big load of new toys we can buy as well.

Seriously excited!

Already posted my thoughts elsewhere, so I won’t again. All I will say is that it’s looking to be a different kind of childrens’ fare, and will be interesting to see how it does at the box office.

I am holding my opinion till i actually see it. As one of the million people who are a fan of this book I hope Mr. Jonze does it justice. I am praying he doesn’t pull what Ang Lee did to the Hulk,Well even if he does maybe we will get a reboot like the hulk!! Too bad Del Toro couldn’t get a hold of this one…..(Sigh)

This movie will suck.

Some books are better left as books. Just ask Mrs. Suess.

Maurice Sendack made a mistake by optioning the property to the movies.

This movie should never have been made, and will suck.

Agree with Chris Webb. Let me guess the movie plot; kid is in some dysfunctional family that is cracking at the seams and goes to some island with the wild things where he becomes king, possibly helping the wild things defeat some ancient evil or other. Kid longs for home and starts building boat. So he returns back to his family whom he misses much and resolves the marital turmoil in his life. Oh yeah he of course comes of age.

It’s a 16 page children’s book with probably around 150-200 words?

Even with Eggers and Jonze, I don’t see how this could be that good. But hopefully not as bad as The Cat in the hat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63xJu5QUimw

And here’s another version of Where the Wild Things Are that is pretty great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvIDRoO8KnM

Chris says:
“This movie should never have been made, and will suck.”

It might suck, or it might be wonderful; it’s hard to say, since neither of us has seen it. But I’ve watched the trailer, which looks beautiful and magical, so at least I’ve got hope instead of negative cynicism.

As for the story, Maurice Sendak was involved with the screenplay at every stage, and gave it his blessing. Guessing that the story will be terrible and assuming the movie is crappy because it’s based on a kids’ book is painfully cynical; this site needs fewer trolls.

Yeah, short stories like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella would never make good movies, either. Is the book itself workable as a straight adaptation? Nope. However… in this case, there is a framework that is strong enough that if the right screenwriter, director, actors come together, it could be great. Who knows? All I can say is that the trailer is fantastic, the visuals are stunning, Jonze is a fine director and has poured years of his life into making this film. I see great potential for this film. When you compare it to the wacky and generic Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs trailer that came out last week and see how most Hollywood versions of children’s books turn out, I think we should all be exciting that something ambitious like Wild Things is coming out. In the end, it may be a failure. However, I can almost guarantee that it will be an interesting failure.

I’m pretty sure today’s audiences wouldn’t be impressed by a movie in which some guy in a furry Henson muppet suit lumbered around with a live action kid. Too Barney The Dinosaur, don’t you know. It’d have to be CGI or 2D. I think the reason people think of Henson doing this is because he pretty much ripped off Sendak while designing his full-size puppet fursuits. But his puppets are old-hat now. Kids would laugh at (and not in a good way) muppets passing themselves off as special effects. Frankly, I wish that the Disney 2D idea had gone into production. The clip I saw of their experimental scene looked fantastic.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a little misty-eyed watching this trailer. I think Jonze said that he didn’t so much intend this to be a children’s movie, but a movie about childhood. From the brief glimpse we’ve been awarded here, he looks to have accomplished just that (Warners interference notwithstanding).

Looks like Wild Things was just bumped to my top three most anticipated films of the year.

After seeing Watchmen I have come to the realization that, with the exception of Up there will not be a single good film coming up in 2009. It’s because of this realization that I discovered theater. I think a good protest against crappy rip offs, remakes, adaptations, and rehashes is to stop seeing these films and instead support the lesser known arts. But then again maybe it’ll be great. It kind of looks like a generic coming of age story told in a generic Independent Film style.

This looks amazing! I’ve watched it about 7 times since last night. I think I might be obsessed…

…help?

My “negative cynicism” is based on 45 years of movie watching, and the knowledge that certain books, especially classic children’s books, are not cinematic stories. They are poetry, they are whimsy, call it what you will, but a movie story needs certain elements to really work, and Where The Wild Things Are and Harold And The Purple Crayon and other great children’s books do not have these elements.

What’s next - “Hop On Pop - The Motion Picture?”

If Spike Jonze wants to make an original movie that is magical in the way a great children’s book is, I would be first in line to see it. But I believe it is Hollywood hubris to think that any book can be made into a satisfying movie. The Watchmen movie shows that the cinema and the novel are two different beasts - each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Hollywood should be creating great cinematic stories like Pixar does and should not piggy back on a known property, especially one that does not contain 90 minutes worth of material. Case in point: The Grinch with Jim Carrey. They had to pad that out to make a feature out of it, and Dr. Suess was too dead at the time to help out.

This movie may be good, it may look great, it may be emotionally involving, but it will not be Where The Wild Things Are. That movie is created in my head every time I look at the book. The movie Spike Jonze is making is something else. Why doesn’t he just make that movie?

J.D. Salinger was right - he did not let them make a movie of Catcher In The Rye - because the novel creates a picture in your head that no movie could match. I mean, if he had, it’d have been this piece of crap 50’s movie with Sal Mineo playing Holden Caulfield or something.

Hollywood should be creating ORIGINAL stories for the screen. The movie is never as good as the book, especially when the book is a picture book that encourages you to create your own film suggested by the images. You may say you want to see the film Spike Jonze sees when he reads the book, and I say he should be creating something orginal.

Enough of my yappin’ - Good night and good luck.

What a blast this trailer is. I’m so excited, I can’t put the right words together.

None of the people who wrote the comments here seem to know at all that I made a faithful animation adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are in the early 1970s. It is distributed to this day by Weston Woods/Scholastic. I didn’t expand it - stretch it - or fiddle with it, just tried, with the technology available to me at the time to be true to it.
However, times have changed, and I wish the producers of this gigantic spin-off will be successful, as Maurice Sendak is great, and the heart of his story is great.

From what I’ve read the Henson company did actually help with the designs of the Wild Things.

Man, it breaks my heart no one mentioned the perfectly faithful animated version by Gene Deitch… except for Gene Deitch! I still run my battered 16mm print every year, and I can attest that kids have always responded to this film. And still do!

Gene Deitch wasn’t mentioned by name, but an earlier comment to this post made by Fuzzy Dunlop has a link that goes directly to a copy of the animation in question. So to nit-pick, the statement that “None of the people who wrote the comments here seem to know at all that I made a faithful animation adaptation”, wasn’t entirely accurate. Check the links, folks! Admittedly however, it would have been polite to provide names with the link, as it’s obvious some posters haven’t checked.

In any case: It’s a good short, Gene! And yet another instance of Peter Schickele’s music that I wasn’t aware of.

Me, I’ll remain curious and open-minded about the film version. It *can’t* be the same as the book, that’s impossible, both due to the length and the medium involved. Just because a work is derivative, doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of artistic merit in its own right. However, if a film is going to use the name and/or features of an original work, it should do two things: make it clear that it’s an adaptation, and be as true as possible to the *spirit* of the original.

This looks like it will be pretty beautiful and good. Better quality versions than the youtube at apple trailers tho:

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

I think a lot of you are missing a big point here.

It finally looks like someone is actually trying to make a good, unique film out of a beloved and nostalgic property. This easily could have been turned into an Alvin and the Chipmunks style exploitation.

I think the trailer looks fantastic and I hope the film will be just as good. Nothing’s ever going to be perfect for anyone. If anything it will just introduce the book to a new generation of kids.

I feel sick to my stomach.

Remind me to come here for a review if I ever need the most cynical, sardonic opinion I can find.

I’ll save the doom and gloom for after the release. ‘Wild Things’ looks delightful to me.

WHY GOD WHY.

I can’t wait to see it! I’ve been interested in this since that test footage leaked.

I am so excited for this movie I can not wait to go see it. This looks exceptional and beautiful and I can’t wait to see the finished product.