SDCC: Where The Wild Things Are Footage

Posted by Scott the Intern (intern@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 24, 2009

There’s been some pretty good news today. Apparently a sequel to The Dark Knight will be filming sometime next year and, of course, it was awesome to see a bit of Heath Ledger’s last performance in the Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus clip, but this Where The Wild Things Are featurette almost had me in tears.

This movie is probably destined to be my favorite of the year. I grew up on that book, and the trailer is clearly the best trailer of the year:

The crowd at Comic-Con got to see a scene from the film, which must have been incredible. It’s really great to see this little mini-documentary talk about how the book wasn’t well-received in the beginning except by children and how Maurice Sendak is in love with Spike Jonze’s adaptation of the book.

The crew over at Geek Tyrant have a really solid write-up of the panel itself. The best quote on the planet was from Max Records (who plays Max) relaying something Maurice Sendak said to him:

Maurice told me, ‘I really like this movie, and I hope people like it. Because if not, they can all go straight to hell.’”

That falls right in line with the oft-used critic line of “If you don’t like this movie, you’re wrong,” but I kind of like it better.

As you’ll note in the featurette, the Wild Things are actually done practically by actors in suits, but the eyes, mouths and some facial expressions are done through CGI. It’s so cool to see the footage of the Wild Things on set playing around.

Unfortunately for those of us stuck at home (or in the hoosegow), we won’t get to see the clips from the movie itself unless they are released online. It appears as if one scene shows Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) taking Max on a little tour of the world, and the other scene involves Max and all the Wild Things building a giant fort out of trees and boulders. The general response has been that the two scenes are really moving, sweet, funny, and look brilliant.

I am geeking out right now.

What do you think?

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