It's a moody, madcap live-action romp

Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, with its rumpus-ing monsters and riley kid protagonist, is a book of sublime simplicity (338 words - just a handful of tweets), but also of depth to the Earth's core.

Picture the image of Max, in his white wolf suit, astride the Minotaur giant as he and the tiger-toothed critter with the striped pullover and the yellow eyes parade through the trees. Or the panel with the Wild Things and Max howling and dancing beneath a big, fat moon. Or Max in his bedroom, sent there without his supper, watching as a forest emerges all around.

It's the stuff of dreams - vivid, beautiful, scary dreams - and you'd be a fool to want to mess with it.

Happily, Spike Jonze, the director of a pair of nutball expeditions into the land of the subconscious - Being John Malkovich and Adaptation - is that fool. With Sendak's blessing, and with the aid of writer Dave Eggers, who teamed on the screenplay, Jonze has transformed the iconic picture book into a satisfyingly moody, melancholy, madcap live-action romp.

Intense and a little insane, Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are doesn't pad the book's bare-bones plot. Max (played with fierce conviction by Max Records) is still the brat who stands on the dining table, defiant and unruly. He still takes a little sailboat to wherever it is the Wild Things live - an island of woods and rocky shores (the picture was shot in South Australia). And the WTs themselves are still mysterious, horned behemoths. (The costumes, designed by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, are scruffily amazing.)

But now they have names, and recognizable voices. Yup, that's Tony Soprano - OK, James Gandolfini - harrumphing around as the dude called Carol. And Catherine O'Hara gives voice to the flipped-out Judith, a woolly thing wracked with hurt feelings.

The prologue, with Max amok in his mom's house (Catherine Keener is the mother), is more elaborate: There's a glimpse of a boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), and a teenage sister with no patience for her weirdo sib.

But then Max is off and running in an altogether different universe: punching holes in twiggy makeshift huts, building an elaborate fort, hurling mud clods in an epic free-for-all, consorting and cavorting with furry gargantuans with names that sound like they belong in a Miami retirement home. (Yes, there's an Ira.)

Jonze and company have decided that the Wild Things represent emotions gone mad: rage, jealousy, loneliness, elation, sorrow. And sometimes, because of that, Where the Wild Things Are can feel like a cinematic study of manic-depression: full-tilt mood swings in a gravity-defying arc.

Where the Wild Things Are is scary and alarming in parts, and younger viewers may be overwhelmed. Sometimes it feels loose, disjointed, stopped in its tracks - as if the filmmakers, too, needed to stop their ferocious imaginary play and take a breath, weary from the squawking, the whooping, the scrums.

Unlike the book, the movie is no masterpiece, but it's a brave and oft-times transcendent endeavor.EndText