Where the Wild Things Are (film) Alexander alone in the fort. Alexander reveals that he suspected that Max is not a king with magical powers, but warns him to never let Carol know. At pre-dawn, Carol throws another tantrum — this time, about the fort, K.W.'s absence, and the eventual death of the sun, which Max talked with Carol about earlier. When Carol gets angry with Max for not doing a good job as king, Douglas tries explaining that he is "just a boy, pretending to be a wolf, pretending to be a king", exposing the truth to the rest of the Wild Things. Carol becomes
Where the Wild Things Are as an escape from their chaotic weekly visits, on Sunday afternoons, to his family's Brooklyn home. Sendak, as a child, had observed his relatives as being "all crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes", with blood-stained eyes and "big and yellow" teeth, who pinched his cheeks until they were red. These relatives, like Sendak's parents, were poor Jewish immigrants from Poland, whose remaining family in Europe were killed during the Holocaust while Sendak was in his early teens. As a child, however, he saw them only as "grotesques". When working on the 1983 opera adaptation of the book with Oliver