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Outstanding.

If one word can define a movie than outstanding is the word that classifies Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are.”

What’s amazing about the film is how much it accomplishes with such limited amount of material to work with. 

Maurice Sendak’s timeless short story, which the film adapts from, musters up just 10 sentences out of its total 338 words.

This forced Jonze and co-screenwriter Dave Eggers to devise concepts that are not mentioned in the book in order to extend the movie to be a full-length feature film.

The result is a film one should not miss seeing.

The story centers on a nine-year old named Max, played by Max Records, who resorts to violence and screaming when things don’t go his way.

After a powerful chaotic scene with his mother, played by Catherine Keener, Max runs away from his home and sails into his own imaginative world, which is inhabited gigantic, furry creatures that speak his language and proclaim Max as “king.”

Max’s first declaration as king is to “let the wild rumpus start!”

From there the soundtrack, a radiant abundance of original songs by Karen O and the Kids, transcend the movie’s mood from scene to scene.

As the movie progresses, Max discovers that where these creatures live is not a happy world. In fact, it is a place that parallels the one he has worked so hard to leave behind.

Max decides to leave his imaginative world, because he has failed to create a perfect kingdom. As Max walks back into his home at the film’s end and embraces his mother, it becomes apparent that life isn’t about what you want it to be, but rather what you can believe it to be.

And that is the beauty of Jonze’s film; it restores hope that no matter how bleak each of our individual worlds are we will never have to walk through them alone, because we will always have our family and our imagination to help us survive.

“Where the Wild Things Are” is humorous and genuine as a film can get, but the strength of the movie is its darker, more adult-based concepts such as fear, loneliness, and misunderstanding.

In a year where the Academy Award’s Best Picture field has been extended to ten nominees as opposed to the previous five, there is no doubt “Where the Wild Things Are” will be one of those nominees.

Jonze vision breathes a new life into one of the most impactful short stories ever written and enhances the story of childhood imagination beyond the page of a book into the live and dimensional world of film.

Any filmgoer who fails to take part in this masterpiece is doing himself or herself a huge disservice.