Let the wild rumpus continue

In theaters Friday: The Blind Side, Planet 51, The Twilight Saga: New Moon

New on DVD/Blu-ray: Bruno, My Sister’s Keeper, Star Trek

Director Spike Jonze’s tasteful expansion of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book Where the Wild Things Are into a feature-length dream opened last month, and next Friday another acclaimed mischief-maker of yore comes to the big screen courtesy of director Wes Anderson, who’s created his own animated vision of Roald Dahl’s 1970 classic Fantastic Mr. Fox.

It’s always fun to see the scamp or the clever underdog triumph, but what is most exciting is that both films have been made with adults in mind as much as kids, and not just in the Toy Story or Shrek way of throwing adults some double entendre or a pop culture bone every 10 minutes. No, it’s woven into the fabric of these films. But that is to be expected from Jonze, who made a name for himself by subverting the MTV clips of the day with lo-fi, creatively wealthy music videos for Beastie Boys, REM, Pavement and Bjork, plus directing indie hits like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.

As for Anderson, The Darjeeling Limited director’s work has always been populated with young characters who are precocious and insightful and adults who are trapped in the mindset—and often the clothing—of their childhoods. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Chas Tenenbaum launches a successful international business at age 9, while 25 years later his brother Richie erects a tent in his bedroom for safe sleeping. This is the same elegiac blend of youth and adulthood, promise and downfall, which was so gleefully explored by Dahl and Sendak in their day, and perhaps perfected by Charles Schultz’s Peanuts—the chief inspiration for Anderson’s Rushmore.

Years after the child-labor era of the Industrial Revolution, we Americans won our youth, and it is a specifically post-modern stance that we don’t intend to give it back. In this way, Anderson’s protagonists and Jonze’s career mirror the adults fawning over Wild Things and Mr. Fox this fall.

Maybe the books, toys and TV shows of our childhood become more cherished over the years because what once were cultural race cars blasting us into the future and wider worlds unexplored become time machines with age, allowing us brief glimpses of the past. Still, even though we can flip through now-tattered copies of My Side of the Mountain and A Light in the Attic, or roll up our sleeves and watch The Outsiders, we know deep down that we can never truly go back. My $8 will get me into a screening of Wild Things, but it won’t transport me to that dimly lit library where I first read it.

But perhaps this is what makes Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are such a beautiful ember, and Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox such a thrilling escape. Because at some point adults stop looking for race cars and start searching for time machines. Because in days like these, looking back is more comforting than looking forward. Because youth never lasts forever. Because setting suns are the prettiest ones.

Fantastic Mr. Fox stars the vocal talents of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman and a host of Anderson’s regular troupe, and the film opens wide Nov. 25.