The liberties Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers took from the very short children's book are many, of course, and if you're one of those people who hates Dave Eggers' style, I'll just warn you before you go in: his voice is all over this thing. Personally, I love his approach to expressing heartache and loneliness, which is what this movie is entirely about, so I found the script wholly effective. You may not, but I still say it's hard to argue that the screenplay isn't successful at least on some level.

The movie is about a boy named Max whose family has seemingly just gone through a divorce. His mother is overworked and stressed about money, and his older sister is a teenager who, in typical teenage fashion, ignores Max in favor of boys and her friends. Feeling neglected and alone (he apparently has no friends either, possibly because the divorce spawned a move), Max frequently acts out in frustration and for attention, terrorizing the family dog, destroying his sister's room when she doesn't defend him, making a scene when his mother invites her new boyfriend over for dinner -- but the script successfully presents Max as a very sensitive, sweet boy at heart who's just going through a tough time and doesn't know how to properly deal with it. And that's what's wonderful about it -- there are no villains in this family. I mean, the kid bites his mother, who's honestly just doing the best she can, and runs away from home, and you still just want to hug both of them. There's a complexity at work in the writing there.

So, in another deviation from the book, Max runs away in the middle of the night and ends up at a creek not far from his home, where his imagination takes off and a boat arrives to take him to Where the Wild Things Are. And though it's light on real plot, everything that happens in fantasy land is absolutely gorgeous. Spike Jonze knows how to make a visually engrossing cinematic experience, and he's definitely done that here. Plus, the CGI on the Wild Things themselves is ridiculously convincing, which, after a summer of Wolverine's Roger Rabbit claws and Terminator: Salvation's cartoon Arnold head, was especially appreciated.

Once there, he meets the Wild Things, all of whom are quickly recognizable as manifestations of parts of Max's own psyche, or of his anxieties about his family members. Right away he befriends Carol (voiced perfectly by James Gandolfini), the mostly jolly, bull in a china shop Wild Thing, who just wants to keep everybody happy and together. He is the truest representation of Max, and though he ends up crowning the little boy king, it is very telling when Carol later comes to the conclusion that Max is not worthy of the title and strips him of it. There's KW (velvetly voiced by Lauren Ambrose), the distant and unattainable one who is equal parts Max's sister and mother, who protects and sees the good in him, even if she is at times distracted by her other, non-Wild Thing outsider friends. There's a very literal scene where she hides him in her belly and protects him from harm that beats you over the head a little, but I'll forgive it that, because their relationship just broke my heart overall. And everyone else is just a little bit of the rest of Max's persona. Paul Dano's Alexander is the part of Max that feels nobody ever listens to him; Chris Cooper's Douglas is simultaneously the best friend Max wishes he had and a symbol of the supreme value he puts on loyalty; Catherine O'Hara's Judith is just everything that's wrong with the entire world, but her husband Ira's (Forest Whitaker) unconditional love for her is Max's comfort that everybody, even bad little boys who bite their mothers, deserves to be loved.

The movie also has a lot of great one-liners, and I laughed a lot, as can be expected from a Spike Jonze work, but it is definitely melancholy on the whole. It's a story about a sad little boy who's desperate for his family's love (and the final scene where his mother gives him his cake and soup, just like in the book, will make your heart cry), so, you know, it's not exactly Shrek the Halls happy fun times throughout. And if you're taking kids, there are a couple scenes that could be considered scary, but hey, we watched Return to Oz and Labyrinth when we were kids, and we turned out OK. Take 'em anyway, because I have a feeling Where the Wild Things Are is a new family classic.