Trailer watch: Where the Wild Things Are

It’s enough to make fans froth at the mouth. A week and a bit after the release of the first poster for Where the Wild Things Are, Warner Bros’ marketing campaign steps into the next gear with the much anticipated unveiling of the film’s first trailer.

The trailer offers some scintillating glimpses of the syrupy smooth visualisations director Spike Jonze has gleaned from Maurice Sendak’s esteemed children’s book, which seems to be the perfect kind of source material for Jonze to adapt: it is both popular and celebrated (ensuring a large built-in audience), gorgeously drawn (offering an interesting base template of visual ideas) and, most importantly, allows near-infinite room for padding out story ideas and plotlines (all up the book is only 10 sentences long).

The trailer offers no real indication of the plot, but the rudiments of the story – we can assume these will flow through into the movie – are as follows: Max (Max Records) is a disobedient young boy who is sent to bed without supper one night after playing up (in the book he growls at his mum and chases the dog with a fork). Inside his bedroom a fantastic world sprouts from his imagination, populated by huge ferocious looking beasts; Max conquers them simply by staring unblinkingly into their eyes. He is crowned ‘King of all Wild Things’ but eventually gets homesick and returns to his bedroom.

The trailer begins with a sleepy Max as he is carried by one of the creatures, his head resting over the back of the creature’s shoulder as we hear its feet stomping on the ground and catch glimpses of its shadow. The trailer’s only dialogue occurs in this opening moment: “I didn’t want to wake you up, but I really want to show you something.” The following consists of a bunch of quick glimpses of Max’s imagination-wilderness and its peculiar looking inhabits, one with a particularly large nose that looks ultra ripe for honking. They are also quite a few glimpses of Max’s real-life world, which begs the question of whether Jonze will bookend the story with ‘reality’ or whether Max will journey back and forth between worlds, Narnia style. This question is likely to be answered when the film’s theatrical trailer is released, which will be a few months down the track.

Where the Wilds Things Are has been scheduled for a December ’09 release in Australia.