We watched Where the Wild Things Are this morning. As expected, Luca thoroughly enjoyed it, and it seemed as though the emotional involvement in the characters was not entirely lost on his 4 year old way of watching movies. He laughed at the slapstick humor, the physical jokes and the fighting scenes, but he looked perplexed and troubled during the quiter, more introspective parts.
When the movie was over, he asked me: “is it true what Carol said? Is the sun really going to switch off soon?”
And I really didn’t know what to answer, without going into the whole “it’s all going to happen after you and I will be long gone” schtick. I guess I’ll have a lot of explaining to do later…

Of course, I loved the movie. One of those rare occasions where big studios do things right, and where a filmmaker is not afraid to show growing up for what it really is: you laugh, you cry, you get mad, you get better. Too many family-oriented movies just dumb everything down, and the result is one big infantile mess. Stupid for the children, insulting for the adults. Pixar have managed to crystallize the formula, Dreamworks less so… but in my book, Spike Jonze came really close to what it really feels like to be 9.
The Neverending Story came out when I was 9, and that is another brilliant example of a family movie that is not afraid to show blood or children in danger. And this has nothing to do with the desensitized way we portray violence right now. Quite the contrary. Both movies take us back to this Grimm-like place in ourselves, which we eventually lose as we grow up.

I think Karen O and Carter Burwell did an excellent job for the original score. Karen O’s voice mixes the manic with the innocent, and her instrumentation remains simple, without becoming simplistic. And that’s the trick: how do you make music about children? Should you over-simplify melodies? Should the music only sound like it was recorded on a cheap xylophone? Or should we look inward, and try to recreate the sounds of our childhood with our articulate, grown-up vocabulary?

I suppose i’ve been asking myself the same questions, as I’ve been hard at work on our show. We are creating the imaginary soundscapes of a boy who has stones for eyes. His reality is like Max’s, a product of his imagination, a series of dreams and recollections. And if I try to remember my childhood, what did it sound like?

It was mostly a happy time, mostly by myself until my sister was born when I was 8. I was quiet, bookish, and very curious. Music was everywhere, all the time. And one of the sounds I remember most is the classical guitar that was lying around. The sound of old nylon strings, and my grandfather trying to teach me some chords.

Maybe this is why I’ve been playing on this little toy guitar more than on any other instrument in the past couple of weeks…