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 Were A.V. Club wrote, "While there's a lot of things I liked in 'Where The Wild Things Were,' I found myself unable to embrace it as much as I wanted to with only three episodes left in the series' run. Part of it is a natural consequence of being a two-parter, but a bigger part is that it introduces an entire new world that there's not enough time to explore." Kathleen Wiedel from "TV Fanatic", gave a 3.2 star rating out of 5, stating: "While this episode wasn't terrible, it really amounted to a whole lot of exposition that should've already