“I’ll eat you up I love you so”: Adaptation, Authorship, and Intermediality in Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are

Abstract

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.