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Falvey contrasts critical work on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are with its role at the epicentre of a series of intermedial adaptations, including Jonze and Dave Eggers’ screenplay, Eggers’ novel The Wild Things and, chiefly, Jonze’s 2009 film. The chapter observes how critical frameworks used to explore the novel’s conceptualization of child psychology can be mapped onto Jonze’s story and his aesthetics; Falvey details Jonze’s exploration of the shifting spaces of identity, existence and nature using filmic means.

This chapter discusses the characteristic of picturebook psychology, which represents and textualizes child play, focusing on author-illustrator Maurice Sendak. Picturebook psychology began with child study, child analysis, and progressive educational work and has since been revised by humanistic ego psychology and bibliotherapy. In Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Sendak updates Freud’s famous dream of the Wolf Man, giving picturebook psychology a neo-Freudian makeover and establishing psychological wildness as the very stuff of child life. The chapter concludes with some discussion of the 2009 film version by Spike Jonze, as well as Dave Eggers’s novelization, published the same year.

This chapter examines Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, a piece of children's literature considered by many as one of the most influential stories for very young children on the cusp of literacy and on the verge of legality. Since its first publication in 1963, the book has gone through innumerable printings, been translated into dozens of languages, received all imaginable plaudits, and been subject to varied scholarly analyses. Sendak's book is about the emergence of law and the story respects children's behaviour and represents not only their intelligence but their emotional ambivalence.

This original screenplay presents a fictional dialogue with Spike Jonze, drawing much of its content from interviews, speeches made by Jonze, and other writings concerning the nature of screenwriting. The dialogue traverses a consideration of the writing process and themes of Jonze’s two original screenplays: Her and Where the Wild Things Are.

This chapter focuses on two authors who show monstrosity and the supernatural in a whole new light: Maurice Sendak and Virginia Hamilton. It first reads Sendak's 1963 picture book Where the Wild Things Are and how its power of fantasy makes the protagonist, Max, an Isaac unbound, as well as how Sendak's notions of monstrosity are informed by his renderings of Jewish ethnicity. It then analyzes Hamilton's “god chile” Pretty Pearl, which both does and does not escape the binding experienced by Jephthah's daughter. It also considers Hamilton's retellings of African American folk tales, with particular emphasis on those that feature women with magical powers, alongside David Wisniewski's picture book Golem. The chapter explains how Sendak and Hamilton move away from the myth of redemptively sacrificed children and toward more nuanced ways of articulating American identities through pain.

Chapter four suggests that the polarization of adult/child binaries in picturebook adaptations consistently highlights adult roles and presence within the story more than in the source, often foregrounding adult characters and featuring adults learning lessons from children. The chapter uses The Lorax and Jumanji to reveal how dual audience works differently in picturebooks and film, highlighting how these films seem to overturn adult/child binaries, placing children in increased power positions for a time, but eventually reestablish aetonormative power structures. The chapter ends by examining Spike Jonze’s controversial adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, a film that emphasizes a common ideology that results from binary polarization in picturebook adaptation, wherein adults are portrayed as feeling powerless despite their seeming position of power.