The Wild Things trailer is amazing

"Didn't want to wake you...but I really want to show you something." Poster courtesy of Warner Bros.

After having been in development hell for many, many years, the trailer seems to have come out for the adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic children's picture book, and it is amazing.

Click here to see it.

Despite the amazingness of the trailer, people seem to be approaching this film with cautious optimism. Aside from the difficulty of stretching out the picture book to a full 90 minutes or more, the film is making the studio nervous, causing them to interfere with it quite a bit. Luckily, that was all worked out, and the film seems to retain its original style. Director Spike Jonze had a really interesting conversation with Ain't It Cool's Moriarty about it a while ago:

Moriarty: It makes sense. Like I’ve seen how my kid reacts if you lose control of your anger. They’re little batteries, they soak it up and then it comes back out in the craziest of ways. You don’t know how and you don’t know when, but it’s not gonna be the same coming out as it was going in. You learn real quick to be careful about what you do and express in front of them, and how. That’s something that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone try to talk about in film. Like I think we try and make kids into saints in movies, and we kind of smooth off the rough edges, and it’s just so much more interesting to see a real kid, and to see how kids try and process the world.

Spike Jonze: And I think that’s what freaked the studio out about the movie too. It wasn’t a studio film for kids, or it wasn’t a traditional film about kids. We didn’t have like a Movie Kid in our movie, or a Movie Performance in a Movie Kid world. We had a real kid and a real world, and I think that’s sort of where our problem was. In the end they realized the movie is what it is, and there’s no real way to... it’s sort of like they were expecting a boy and I gave birth to a girl.

From what that says, this movie seems to take an unexpected approach to realism, in both its characters and a little bit in its story, which would probably worry those who want to market the movie to children. My guess is that the film will be aimed towards slightly older kids, rather than toddlers, although that may not entirely be a bad thing for ticket sales.

Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is composing the score, and both James Gandolfini AND Catherine Keener are starring in it, so that makes me all the more excited. Like everyone else, though, I'm hoping and praying this doesn't turn out to be another Grinch.