Where the Wild Things Are Pols of "Time" magazine wrote that "[w]hat makes Sendak's book so compelling is its grounding effect: Max has a tantrum and in a flight of fancy visits his wild side, but he is pulled back by a belief in parental love to a supper 'still hot,' balancing the seesaw of fear and comfort." "New York Times" film critic Manohla Dargis noted that "there are different ways to read the wild things, through a Freudian or colonialist prism, and probably as many ways to ruin this delicate story of a solitary child liberated by his imagination." In Selma G. Lanes's book
Where the Wild Things Are (opera) Where the Wild Things Are (opera) Where the Wild Things Are, Op. 20, is a 'fantasy' opera in one act by Oliver Knussen to a libretto by Maurice Sendak, based on Sendak's own children's book of the same title. Knussen composed the music from 1979 to 1983, on commission from the Opèra National, Brussels. In form and subject matter the work relates to Maurice Ravel's "L'enfant et les sortilèges", as well as Stravinsky's "The Nightingale". Knussen also included a number of musical quotations, including Debussy's "La boîte à joujoux" and the bell motif from the Coronation Scene of Mussorgsky's "Boris