A nine year old has a temper tantrum when his older sister's friend ruins his igloo so he soaks the carpet in her room and wrecks a gift he gave to her. Max then feels ignored by his mom and her boyfriend so he has another tantrum, ends up biting his mother, and then runs out of the house, alone and at night, to hide from her (Falcon). He then runs around sand dunes with the Wild Things who look cool but are depressing. Carol has anger management problems, Judith is annoying, the bird gets his armed ripped off, the goat is ignored, the bull is silent, and KW wants to leave the group, which was probably a good idea. Carol, Max's closest friend, can't control his anger and attempts to eat the child when he learns that Max is not a king. The child goes home to his mother who hugs him and feeds him a big piece of chocolate cake. I didn't get it. I kept on thinking that Max may need to be medicated, that his mother should be more strict, and why is Mark Ruffalo in this movie for 10 seconds?

Thank goodness I'm not the only one who thinks that Max is just a child with anger issues.

I get each Wild Things represents an inner demon/issue that Max is going through and that most children deal with in childhood but man, the whole time I watched the movie I kept wondering how I was supposed to like the main character and root for him when he doesn't actually seem to learn anything... He has a hissy fit, bites his mom, escapes into an imaginary world where he messes everything up, and then is spoiled rotten when he does come home.... Is this what we are supposed to be teaching our kids? That is ok to demand everything goes your way and then get mad and break things when they don't?

You realize the book happens to be about a "child with anger issues?"

Listing the storyline as if it's supposed to be some logical, linear narrative is completely missing the point. This is a story about a child's emotional world full of mysterious symbols and events that exist precisely because he can't understand them. It's also not supposed to be moralistic in any way. This is simply a portrait of the raw, emotional world of a child (which all adults revert to on occasion, some more than others) and if you didn't understand the profound beauty of that, then I fear you didn't give it a chance to begin with.