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Film

Unleashing Life’s Wild Things

Max Records and two co-stars in “Where the Wild Things Are."Credit...Warner Brothers Pictures

A FEW weekends ago I sat near the back of the biggest theater in my local multiplex, part of a packed house watching Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are.” The film had just opened to reviews that ranged from grouchy to ecstatic, and to quite a bit of hand wringing about its dark, sad, scary or otherwise non-child-appropriate content. There was a lot of speculation too about the size, composition and receptivity of the audience. Would children embrace it? Would adults be scared off? Who was this movie — so melancholy in its whimsy, so rueful in its sentiment — really meant for?

I had already seen “Wild Things” once, but I wanted at least a sliver of anecdotal evidence to support my own hunches about its effect on viewers of various ages. My children were a little too old to serve as ideal research subjects, a role to which they had long since resigned themselves. Tweener and teenager that they are (it happened so fast!), they were also, at first, a little reluctant to see a film that seemed to be pitched either at 5-year-old graduates of progressive nursery schools or at 25-year-old graduates of progressive liberal arts colleges. But in the end they were surprised at how much they liked what they saw and impressed by how “emo” the movie turned out to be.

Which is, in a way, the nub of the interesting controversy that has enveloped “Where the Wild Things Are,” and expanded into the latest wide-ranging adult argument about the feelings of children. Parents, most of whom want their kids to be both adventurous and protected, comfortable and sophisticated, tend to worry a lot about (and to judge one another by) how much and what kinds of movies children should see. On Friday the argument will shift to Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” about an unrepentant poultry killer, and in the meantime there is Disney’s “Christmas Carol,” which is both a pretty scary ghost story and a rather stern Victorian lesson in the fear of death.

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Mr. and Mrs. Fox, voiced by George Clooney and Meryl Streep, in “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”Credit...Fox Searchlight Pictures

Mr. Jonze’s film, extrapolated from a few hundred words and a dozen or so illustrations by Maurice Sendak — not uncontroversial in their own right, by the way — is dense with difficult emotions. The hero, Max, is often angry and lonely, frustrated when his sister neglects him and jealous when his divorced mother spends time with her boyfriend. The depiction of Max’s home life and his impulsive, aggressive behavior seem almost designed to provoke disapproval from some concerned, hypercritical party or another, even if those opening scenes of domestic chaos also elicit a flicker of pained recognition.

But like Dorothy before him, who found in Oz some of the same characters she’d left back in Kansas, Max escapes to an enchanted world that looks a lot like home. The furry, talking creatures who give the movie its name are strikingly grouchy, quarrelsome and passive-aggressive. They whine, they pout, they manipulate, they break things and hurt one another for no good reason. One of them makes a big deal about her cool new friends, who turn out to be a pair of terrified owls. Others use self-deprecation as a way to feel special, or deploy aggression to mask insecurity.

They act, in short, just like people and turn to Max, a human child in a wolf suit who proclaims himself a king, to deliver them from their humanity. The love between ruler and subjects is mutual, but so is the disillusionment that rounds off Max’s sojourn on the island and sends him back across the sea to his mother. No place is free of conflict and bad feeling, and no person has the power to make problems disappear. Where there is happiness — friendship, adventure, affection, security — there is also, inevitably, disappointment. That’s life.

When you stop to think about it, this is a pretty strong message, and not what you might expect from children’s entertainment. But at the same time, this kind of honest, realistic assessment of human relationships has gone missing from far too many supposedly grown-up movies, which are almost hysterical in their eagerness to dispense comfort, sentimentality and neat, tidy endings. However violent or foulmouthed they may be, most of these commercial entertainments offer soothing scenarios of wish fulfillment. Justice is served. The bad guys pay. Love conquers all. The naughty boys come home from their crazy adventures and find that their mommies still love them. (That’s a plot summary of “The Hangover,” by the way, not of “Where the Wild Things Are.”)

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Wybie, left, and the title heroine of “Coraline.”Credit...Focus Features

But things are much more complicated in some children’s movies, it seems, where the regressive infantilism of grown-up comedies and action pictures is answered by a grave precocity. A movie like “Where the Wild Things Are” or Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” play a kind of reverse dress-up, disguising adult anxieties in the costumes of innocent make-believe and fanciful spectacle.

Mr. Anderson’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s spiky little beast fable has some of the usual trappings of juvenile animation: talking animals voiced by movie stars; cool pop songs on the soundtrack; grotesque villains and a charming hero who foils their nasty schemes. But it also has some unusual features: not just the old-fashioned, super-analog stop-motion animation, but also an uneasy, downbeat undercurrent that makes it feel like, well, a Wes Anderson movie. The marriage between Mr. and Mrs. Fox is threaded with tensions that even Mr. Fox’s successes don’t resolve. A subplot involving their son, Ash, and his charismatic cousin, Kristofferson, explores adolescent rivalry with startling candor and force.

Will “Fantastic Mr. Fox” be too scary for youngsters? Too confusing? Maybe, for some. But so was “Coraline,” Henry Selick’s pitch-perfect adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s kiddie-gothic novel. So was “Edward Scissorhands,” Tim Burton’s indelibly dark portrait of the artist as a young goth. (A retrospective of Mr. Burton’s work will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Nov. 22; his new film, “Alice in Wonderland,” will be released next year.) So is “The Wizard of Oz” and half the books in the children’s section of the library. And so, of course, is “Wild Things.”

The impulse to protect children from these kinds of stories is understandable. Like adults, they experience plenty of hard feelings in their daily lives — at home, on the playground, in the classroom, in their dreams — and they may want, as we do, to use movies and books as a form of escape. Bright colors, easy lessons and thrilling rides that end safely and predictably on terra firma have their place. But so, surely, do representations of the grimmer, thornier thickets of experience. That’s what art is, and surely our children deserve some of that too. Which includes movies that elicit displeasure and argument along with rapture.

Sometimes we make too much of the division between generations, which is after all not a gap but a continuum. Every adult is a former child, just as every child is an incipient adult, and at their best, children’s film and literature (which of course are almost never made by children themselves) is an attempt to communicate across this distance. Young viewers may see a premonition of what lies ahead as well as a sympathetic rendering of what they already know, whereas adults may find pleasure in recalling old hurts and relief that they are not at the mercy of them.

Like Max, Coraline flees her parents to find refuge in a world that is both the projection of her own wishes and a menacing alternate reality. She returns prepared to accept the imperfection she had found so intolerable and to make the best of it. Max, for his part, finds himself drawn back to that place where, in Mr. Sendak’s words (not uttered in the movie because they don’t need to be), “someone loves him most of all.” Not perfectly, but as he is.

The movie’s final scene, of Max digging into a piece of chocolate cake as his mother gazes lovingly down upon him, is a perfect resolution to the story, one that unites the generations even as it measures the differences between them. The mother has sacrificed something for her son’s comfort, and his obliviousness is the appropriate and desired response. He does not feel grateful, or sorry, or guilty — that will come later.

And that ending may be, for some children in the audience, an afterthought, even a letdown, a necessary coda to the more dramatic conclusion that is Max’s departure from the island. The two small boys sitting next to me were certainly signaling as much as they squirmed on the laps of their mother and father, expressing delight at what they had seen and impatience to move on to the next thing. Maybe they wondered why their mother was weeping, but they didn’t ask why. They’ll find out some day. Art can do that.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Unleashing Life’s Wild Things. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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