The blogosphere went gaga for Where the Wild Things Are last week, after a trailer was released for the upcoming film adaptation directed by Spike Jonze from a script he co-wrote with Dave Eggers.
There were a few voices of dissent, though. Noah Millman, for example, responded to Peter Suderman‘s claim that the trailer is “a perfectly sold hipster nostalgia piece” by articulating several “red flags” that, in his view, indicated the film was not paying proper respect to Maurice Sendak’s original book.
Time will tell how the movie itself holds up to scrutiny. In the meantime, here are a couple of earlier adaptations, one complete and one merely a test reel.
First, the original 1973 animated film directed by Gene Deitch:
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And second, a 1983 test reel combining hand-drawn animation and some very-new-at-the-time computer-generated animation – produced by Disney and directed by none other than future Pixar guru John Lasseter:
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