When the wild things tire

There's an obvious parallel to be made between Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things are (co-written by Dave Eggers) and Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (co-written by Noah Baumbach).

But, really, the similarities (indie-bred Directors who put a special focus on art, pedigreed writing teams, "children's book" source materials, animation) just emphasize the difference in both quality and content.


Where the Wild Things are is a moody, depressing and downright boring exercise in the sub-conscious. Rather than providing a cohesive story or plot, Jonze and Eggers extrapolate an eight-year-olds subconscious into a group of monsters—with each playing the role of a different anti-social tendency. The result is a strangely bland and tedious movie that doesn't really do or mean anything in the end. And the monsters rarely dance.


You have Fantastic Mr. Fox on the other side. Rather than continuing to explore the same moody tendencies than have weighed down his last few movies, Andersen mentions them and then focuses on the story and the characters. Instead of devolving into a psychological examination of what it means to be an animal, he mentions that possibility and then focuses on a more erudite exploration of the classic tropes and plot devices of the children's movie genre. And the animals often dance.