The Miyazaki Effect: Where the Wild Things Are

We adults have two different understandings of what childhood is all about. On the one hand, there is the way children’s external behavior appears to us. We use the word “childish” to describe this: capricious, petty, sulky, selfish—it is always a bad thing. On the other hand, there is the way we imagine children’s internal experience of the world to be. For this, we have a different word, “childlike,” as in “he was filled with a childlike wonder.” Or we say, “He was like a kid in a candy shop.” This has a positive connotation. What we mean is that children feel emotions with a purity that is rare in adulthood. As adults, it is seldom that we feel positive emotions untinged by irony, doubt, or fear. Children, we imagine, must be the opposite. There is an intensity to their affect—they feel real wonder, real hope, real joy, real love.

Adults who long for the joys of childhood are drawn to books and films that capture this childlike intensity of emotion. No one is more successful at this than the Japanese anime director, Hayao Miyazaki. His films’ protagonists are almost always children, and it is through their eyes that we see the magical world Miyazaki weaves around them. It is a world, first of all, of unmitigated wonder, a world of uncompromising love, of true bravery, of absolute joy. Plot is secondary in a Miyazaki movie—what is more important is that we feel the intensity of this emotion, the joy when Kiki, in Kiki’s Delivery Service, takes to the air on a broomstick; or the wonder when Chihiro, in Spirited Away, rides a train across a watery landscape whose passengers are adult-sized shadows. These shades are not frightening apparitions but rather polite and kind silhouettes, shambling silently through their daily routines. Is this how the adult world appears to a child, with its anonymous multitudes, their faces too high above to see or hear clearly?

Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze and written by Dave Eggers, has been billed as a “children’s movie for adults.” What is meant by this, I think, is that it captures this “Miyazaki effect,” the ability to instill in its viewers a childlike intensity of emotions like wonder and joy. The movie, however, fails to live up to this billing. The protagonist is Max, a boy of about nine, who goes about mostly in a wolf costume. After a fight with his mother, culminating in his biting her on the arm, he sets sail for the land of the Wild Things, large furry creatures with even larger heads. When he gets there, there are, it is true, some moments of sheer magic, as when Max cries, “let the wild rumpus start!” and the Wild Things all take off through the forest, leaping high into the air, as if gravity were an unnecessary hindrance, an adult affair; or when Max’s closest Wild Thing friend, Carol, shows him an elaborate miniature world he has created out of sticks and rocks, hidden away in a cave. Mostly, though, the Wild Things just bicker and fight endlessly—in a word, they’re childish. In the few scenes of Max at home, before he sets sail for the land of the Wild Things, we learn that his parents are divorced—one of the things that sets him off on his rampage is seeing his mother kiss another man. The Wild Things just desperately want to stick together, but they seem always on the verge of going their separate ways—and perhaps this is Max’s biggest fear. It is easy to read the Wild Things as a projection of the child of a broken home—Max cannot trust in the permanence of relationships. That is, of course, with one exception. In the end, the movie falls back on the safe and familiar comfort of maternal love. Max realizes that this is the one thing he can never lose, and he leaves the Wild Things to return to his mother’s waiting arms.

The children's book, Where the Wild Things Are, upon which the movie is based, definitely achieves the Miyazaki effect—it captures the unmitigated joy of being wild: free, without rules, no one to boss you around! This is what Max wants and this is what he gets in the land of the Wild Things. He is the king and he can do whatever he wants. The movie, however, fails to translate this effect. At the same time, it does not give us what we expect from adult movies made for adults, either: a good story with a decent plot and interesting characters. The members of Max’s family are no more than sketches, and the Wild Things, who perhaps represent Max’s child-ish-ly exaggerated understanding of their personalities, are not really engaging. Their constant fighting and arguing could not really be said to constitute a plot.

The movie is not all bad, though—as the portrait of the psyche of a troubled child it holds some interest. It is hard, though, to figure out who it is really for. It does not seem to be for children—too many adult-themed conversations. Nor is it for adults who want to be children—there are not enough moments of magical wonder and joy. Nor, in fact, is it for adults who are just happy to be adults. It is endlessly sulky and petty, like an obstinate child, unwilling to meet us half way. It is, in short, a movie that wants to be childlike, but ends up just being childish.