Movies for Kids with an Adult Twist

Max's wolf suit is being sold in adult sizes. Mr. Fox dances to a soundtrack that features the Rolling Stones and British rocker Jarvis Cocker. And Alice has blossomed from a 7-year-old girl into a 19-year-old woman.

In the coming months, Hollywood will unveil a series of films based on classic children's books and made by leading art-house directors who have reworked the tales for the 21st century. The result: a slate of big-budget movies sewn from the fabric of children's literature but tailored to look edgier, hipper and more appealing to adults.

Tim Burton transforms the lead character of Lewis Carroll's books into a young woman escaping an unwanted wedding proposal in Walt Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," due out next year. (Johnny Depp plays the Mad Hatter.) Wes Anderson reinvents Roald Dahl's tale, "Fantastic Mr. Fox," in stop-motion animation, filling the film with ironic twists and quick-witted dialogue about marriage and mortgages (George Clooney provides the voice of Mr. Fox, and Meryl Streep plays his wife). And Spike Jonze—the indie filmmaker who made his name with the high-concept film "Being John Malkovich"—signed on acclaimed author Dave Eggers to help adapt Maurice Sendak's storybook "Where the Wild Things Are."

The new films feature jokes that may go over the heads of some children and music that's more likely to be on adult iPods than on the playlists of 7-year-olds. Singer Karen O of the rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs penned and performed original songs for the soundtrack of "Where the Wild Things Are." "It was about getting the right sentiment," she says.

Some Hollywood executives worry that studios are aiming to make hits that appeal to a wide audience at the expense of making movies that are truly for children. Others believe that studios are just trying to hook adults, never mind what children want.

  Actor Max Records in 'Where Wild Things Are'

"Where the Wild Things Are," which cost $80 million to $100 million to make, hits theaters next weekend. If it, "Fox" and "Alice" succeed at the box office, they could help encourage other art-house directors to take on children's properties, an arena normally dominated by computer-animated films from Walt Disney's Pixar and DreamWorks Animation SKG.

"When we first brought the script to Warner Bros.," recalls "Wild Things" producer Vincent Landay, "we told the studio, 'This is pretty much as far from a Pixar movie as you can get.' "

From the beginning, says Mr. Landay, he and Mr. Jonze wanted to make a movie that would draw an older audience, and told the studio that the film wouldn't appeal to 3-year-olds. "We always wanted to age higher," says Mr. Landay.

Advance research on the "Wild Things" movie—called "tracking" in the entertainment industry—shows interest in and awareness of the movie across all groups, but particularly among young women. A number of fashion designers are seeking to capitalize on that interest. Opening Ceremony, a specialty clothing store based in New York with locations in Los Angeles and Tokyo, is selling a jewelry collection and faux-fur line based on the movie. In its two U.S. locations and online, the store sold out of about 90 its $610 adult-sized unisex wolf suits, which Opening Ceremony modeled on Max's, in the first hour they went on sale. The company is making more. "I think our clothes have sold so well because customers have a nostalgia for the book," says Humberto Leon, co-owner of Opening Ceremony.

   Mia Wasikowska in 'Alice in Wonderland'

"Wild Things" faced a number of challenges, among them the question of how to animate the creatures' faces. Without the assistance of computer-generated imaging, the faces of the wild things—actual costumes designed by artist Sonny Gerasimowicz and built by the Jim Henson Co.—were initially frozen in place. Viewers in early test screenings "couldn't figure out which voice was coming from whom" because the monsters' mouths didn't move, says Mr. Landay. The filmmakers always knew they would have to use computer animation to enliven the creatures' faces for close-ups, but whether they would have to use it for background characters was an open question. The filmmakers ultimately decided to use computer-generated images to animate all the faces of the wild things, even when they were in the background.

 

When Mr. Jonze signed on to make the movie roughly six years ago, the biggest film he had made cost $19 million (2002's "Adaptation," co-starring Ms. Streep and Nicolas Cage) and he had more experience with skateboards than with children's literature. But he had a clear idea of what he wanted to do with the film. "I realized that what I wanted was to make a movie about what it really feels like to be 9 years old," he says. "As I started to write, I began thinking about the wild things as wild emotions."

In the movie, young Max clashes with his mother, who is raising him alone. Frustrated, he sails off to the land of the wild things, a band of monsters who have deposed king after king in their quest to get along with one another. In one scene, one of the wild things starts smashing houses as a bonfire burns nearby. Love and anger in the movie are closely linked, with gentle dirt clod fights turning violent.

Some of the primal emotions in "Wild Things" are true to the original story. When Harper & Row published the book in 1963, it provoked controversy among parents, librarians and child psychologists, some of whom pronounced the story—and its illustrations of hulking beasts—too scary for sensitive children. In a column written for the Ladies' Home Journal, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim criticized the book for heightening children's anxieties about abandonment.

Those were the very elements that Mr. Jonze says he wanted to preserve in his film. He says when he first started writing the script he told Mr. Sendak that he was "nervous" because the book meant so much to so many readers. "We talked a lot about how it was important to create something that doesn't pander to children—something that is as dangerous as the book was considered at the time," says Mr. Jonze.

 Diane Levin, a professor of early childhood education at Wheelock College, says the line between entertainment for children and adults is becoming increasingly blurred.

  A scene from 'Fantastic Mr. Fox'

She adds that while books like "Where the Wild Things Are" can help kids express and understand emotions, the live-action representation may affect children differently because "once the story is created and rendered for them visually, it can be scarier."

In "Fantastic Mr. Fox," the title character tries to overcome his animal urges to become a respectable newspaper writer and settle down into a comfortable domestic life with his wife—but fails. In one scene, Mr. Fox stops to admire the silhouette of a wolf—identifying with the creature's untamed instincts. The film was co-written by Mr. Anderson and Noah Baumbach, who wrote and directed the film "The Squid and the Whale."

Mr. Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" takes its title from the classic tale but deviates from the book in its story. (Mr. Burton's 2005 film version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" also took liberties with the plot of the original novel by Roald Dahl, adding flashbacks to the childhood of eccentric candy maker Willy Wonka, played by Mr. Depp.) Although the coming film is set in the whimsical world of Wonderland, the film picks up more than a decade after the book leaves off, with Alice returning as an adult to the magical place she first discovered as a child.

Alice attends a party at a lavish Victorian estate where an unwanted suitor proposes marriage to her in front of hundreds of people. She follows a white rabbit down a hole—and lands in Wonderland, which she doesn't remember.

Andrew Sellon, president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, worries that the film's title will confuse audiences, who might not understand that it's an amalgation of two Carroll books ("Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," often abbreviated as "Alice in Wonderland," and "Through the Looking-Glass") with Mr. Burton's personal touches. "But I get it," says Mr. Sellon. "That title is what sells."

One of the first moves Mr. Jonze made to take "Wild Things" in a more mature direction was to hire Mr. Eggers—whose memoir about the death of his own parents, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," became a best seller—to co-write the screenplay with him. Mr. Eggers later wrote a novel loosely based on that screenplay and Mr. Sendak's book, due out this month—in hardback and fur-covered editions.

With their script, Mr. Jonze says that he and Mr. Eggers aimed to create a sense of reality that would pervade a story that exists mainly in the realm of fantasy. He felt that by making the film look as real as possible, he could preserve the sense of danger and loneliness in Mr. Sendak's book.

"I wanted to be on location, I wanted the creatures to look like they actually lived there," says Mr. Jonze. "That way the story would feel real and it would feel dangerous."

Mr. Landay says that he and Mr. Jonze brought together some of the voice actors (including Forest Whitaker and James Gandolfini) in the spring of 2006, shortly before they cast 12-year-old Max Records in the role of Max. They recorded the entire film together in Los Angeles over about three weeks, with Mr. Jonze and Catherine Keener—who plays Max's mother—taking turns acting out the role of Max. For the dirt-clod fight, Mr. Landay and Mr. Jonze had the actors pelt one another with dinner rolls. "To record them together allowed a much more naturalistic performance," says Mr. Landay.

In order to provoke strong emotions from Mr. Records when he began to film his part, Mr. Jonze, Ms. Keener, and members of the crew all would take turns surprising the young actor in various ways, including dressing up as characters from "Star Wars." A sword swallower came to set one day. And in one particular scene where Max must act scared and surprised, Ms. Keener covered herself in fake blood and stood just off-stage.

The film does feature scary moments, particularly one scene where Max, who becomes the leader of the monsters, happens upon a stack of bones and asks the wild things whether they are the remains of previous kings.

But Mr. Jonze and Mr. Landay find moments like those central to their concept. "One of the central ideas in the movie is uncertainty—the way you never know if you're in a safe place or not," says Mr. Landay.