Wild Things

I saw the movie, "Where The Wild Things Are" recently. It has had me thinking a bit. My friend Amy said the monsters on the island were emotions. So armed with this knowledge or thought I viewed the movie. Now everybody is probably familiar with the book, but I hadn't read it since I was a kid. While walking thru B&N the other day I picked it up and read it again. It took all of 3 minutes. Like most kids books it is short, with lots of pictures and the story is really about 20 pages long. Tough to make a 101 minute movie out of 20 pages. And I do think some of it showed.

Max is a wild out of control kid and runs away from home. he finds a boat and sails to an island of misfit monsters. Amy's take was the monsters are emotions. All the negative, bad, destructive emotions. A lot of the ones that are making Max rebel. The emotions run wild & free, and build things and destroy things. Max becomes the king and learns there are things that just can't be fixed. At the end Max decides to stop trying to be an adult and go home to be a kid once again. His mom greets him with hugs and smiles and dinner. The monster Max is gone replaced by a better little boy.

Hm... It was a simple ending and I might be thinking about it wrong, but I had a hard time buying Max's redemption. It was too movie simple. There was growth and an unspoken epiphany, but like all movies, wrapped it up in a nice package.

I find that I have an island where my monsters run wild and free. And they are destructive and lonely like the monsters Max found... I'm going to probably always have these monsters. I just need to make them better monsters...