The result isn’t labored, so much as well-behaved. It’s difficult not to watch the movie as a series of decisions carefully made and problems responsibly addressed by Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers: Will the unruly protagonist Max remain a pre-literate five or be older? (Older.) Is the projection of his inner world best achieved through animation or puppetry? (Puppetry.) Natural or fantastic landscapes? (Both.) What sort of music will comment on the action? (Insipid indie rock.) But, mainly, if one is to make something more than a 10-minute short, how to open up the book?

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Arriving at the heart of darkness, Max finds the Wild Things staging their own destructive freak-out in the woods. Nine-foot puppets with digitally enhanced expressions and celebrity voices (Catherine O’Hara’s being by far the most expressive), the WTs are hyper-real reproductions of Sendak’s cuddly-scary creatures—if considerably more loquacious. Master Record acquits himself well playing opposite these things, particularly once he becomes their king and proclaims that the mad, dancing, shouting, havoc-wreaking Wild Rumpus must begin. It is this taboo-breaking expression of infantile rage and the fantasy of omnipotence, given a spread of six wordless pages in a 37-page book, that Professor John Cech described in his tome on Sendak’s poetics as “a complete, pre-Oedipal submersion in the child’s ecstatic eroticism in which he satisfies his libido’s wish to dance with the overpowering beasts of his own creation.”

The book ends soon after; the movie goes for perhaps another hour. Falling asleep in the midst of a creaturely cuddle-puddle, Max awakes not in his room, as more or less happens in the book, but to the realization that he, the King of the Wild Things, must rule. (Call it his Obama moment.) “Will you keep out all the sadness?” one subject wonders. Turns out that the Jonze-Eggers WTs are rife with complicated relationships, hurt feelings, lost best friends, and secret new ones. (The identity of the latter makes for the movie’s funniest joke.) In an attempt to maintain his position, King Max produces one rumpus too many—and the neediest member of the gang (James Gandolfini) rips off the big bird thing’s arm (a horrifying moment, actually). Yelling that the perp is “out of control,” Max has learned what it’s like to be a parent: Time to go home.

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Jonze has said that Sendak encouraged him to find himself in Where the Wild Things Are. Dutifully, the filmmaker gave Max a single mom and spent hours with Eggers talking about their respective childhoods. Not much poetic sublimation here. What’s best about Jonze’s movie is its kinetic feel for physical play—herky-jerky camera as Max and the WTs zip and bounce through the forest—not surprising from a former skateboard punk like Spike. What’s weakest is its blandness, the sense memory of a child raised on Sesame Street. The psychic environment is less King Kong’s Skull Island than Fred Rogers’s neighborhood: Where the Wild Things Aren’t.