Where The Wild Things Are: The Wild Rumpus Edition

When I first watched this movie I ended up getting bored, and kinda hated Max. Trimming this movie way back and restructuring it gave me so much more enjoyment. I absolutely love this version. Max is a lot more likeable, and I personally like the cut backs to the real world to show the parallels. I didn't have expectations of the indie music being in the movie from the trailers, but I'm so glad they were added in. I don't think I would have ever watched this movie again if not for this edit.

I highly enjoyed this edit!! I loved the musical choices and I really liked how the story was restructured to cut back and forth between the real world and wild world. The intro was great, and I liked the new ending as well!

This was a very professional looking edit and I think it's now my preferred version of this movie!

Seamless edit. The restructuring worked so much better than the original film. The music was a vast improvement in my opinion. This is absolutely my go to version of this movie. Great work!

The film already had wonderful visuals, but njvc managed to put the magic of childhood into it. Keeping the focus entirely on Max, while trimming away the things that would make us wish he hadn't - this is the now the experience it always should have been. What a brilliant transformation.

Whether someone was a fan of the original film or not, I recommend you give this version a shot. It's a ride worth taking.

My review is based on the blu-ray version of the fanedit.

Technically, it was brilliant. There wasn't a single cut audio or visual that indicated this was a fanedit. I was really surprised by this. Removing and replacing music, that can be a really difficult task, but had I not seen the original, I would not have known this was a fanedit. I really liked all the music choices too (well, one exception mentioned below)

Narrative was mostly fantastic. I did not care for the original. In the original the kid was annoying and bratty and that's not how I like my main characters to be. Cutting all of his unlikeable scenes actually made him tolerable in this version.

I didn't really get the ending at first though. It was so fast, all of a sudden the movie was over and I was left with "wait, what just happened, how's it over" I had to rewind it to watch again because it really comes up on you. If you look away for 5 seconds, literally you miss the whole thing. After rewatching though, it's actually much darker than I noticed naturally. I think this was one area where the music didn't really work. It sounded like a happy ending, but upon rewinding and rewatching the last 30 seconds, I was like "wait a minute, that's not happy at all, this is actually a really dark ending." The implications of that last interaction with his mom and the camera zoom on his outfit really is a much darker ending than the music and title screen seemed to indicate.

I highly recommend this edit. I especially would recommend this edit to be shown to others as an introduction to fanedits. I suspect that everyone who has seen the original will like this version better and anyone who hasn't seen the original would never even realize this wasn't original - and when told, they'd have no interest in going back.

Enjoyment: 9 (original 4)