I finally saw Where the Wild Things Are. Given the emoting you’re used to from me, you might be predisposed to think that it dissolved me into a puddle of tears, but guys, I made it almost all the way through! Which is sort of unexpected, not only because it’s me but because everyone in the film spends so much time being sad.

Here’s what I liked about it, and let me be clear that this is what most people DON’T like about it: Max reacts to his situation not by running away so much as by reliving it with giant clawed monsters. The island of the wild things is a deep, deep dive into Max’s problems, but with way cooler houses, and while this seems to be one of the most recurrent criticisms of the film (not fun enough for actual children! too much psychological projection!), I actually thought it was the only way this movie could make sense.

Because an unfortunate truth of my own life is that even as a kid I was limited by my own imagination. The stories I made up, and the ones I wrote down, were the products of what I’d lived and done and read. Even my dreams were made up mostly of things I remembered from my waking life, if much weirder, what with that sailboat coming out of the bathtub drain and all, and that’s true for all of us, I think. I mean, I could imitate, I could rearrange, I could come up with things that felt new, but all stories are essentially inseparable from their sources.

Jonze makes this angle clear: Max’s creations haven’t emerged from the ether. Monster Carol behaves like Max, and KW often seems like a mash-up of his sister and his mom. Everyone speaks in the kind of simple sentences a kid would use, or that adults use when talking to kids. Since this world is of his making, it’s only logical. And despite the truly excellent rumpus at the beginning, things devolve into tantrums pretty quickly, just as they did before he ran away.

Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro’s dark fairy-tale set in fascist Spain, was no idyll, either. Both movies start with a story: Max runs full-tilt down the stairs after the dog, fork in hand, hunting his dinner, and Ofelia’s books tell of a lost underworld princess. We quickly learn the miserable circumstances of each, and of their growing separation from their parents. Most importantly, both kids are extended an invitation to an otherworld in which they must prove themselves as royalty. (Ofelia has a harder time of this last task.)

Neither kid finds much in the way of solace in these new homes, because they are exactly as dark and difficult as the ones they’ve tried to avoid. Max’s situation is obviously not as dangerous as Ofelia’s, and his monsters are correspondingly much cuter, if a little mopey. But that dirt clod fight is basically the episode with the snowballs writ large, just as the Pale Man’s test of Ofelia’s character is a banquet only because Ofelia was sent to bed without supper that night. In each, the fantasy world’s rules always follow from what’s happening in the concrete.

The distance between what’s real and what’s imagined is so much bigger in movies ABOUT children than in movies FOR children. This is why 25-year-olds don’t watch those old Winnie the Pooh movies or go to, like, G-Force when they’re feeling nostalgic, and why WTWTA has been such an advertising juggernaut. If you’re six and you’re watching Winnie the Pooh, you’re in the woods with him. But the problem of being an adult is that you can’t really enter that world without a proxy, which is why Max and Ofelia exist.

That’s also why kids don’t get this movie. They shouldn’t. They don’t need proxies. WTWTA is not made for them, even if it was erroneously marketed to them. This movie is partly for people who know who Spike Jonze is, but more so for people sufficiently removed from being an actual kid that they can look back and now realize–much much later–that the igloo wasn’t any more awesome than the world outside it, and in fact the angle from which you see the world must necessarily triangulate your dreams.

So, I did tear up a little, which is what I started this post with and I’ll come back to it now. But not when Max and Carol are gazing soulfully at each other over the waves. I didn’t lose it until he finally makes it home, when mom collapses to the ground, pulling him in,  so full of words that in the end she can’t use any of them and just drinks him in with her eyes: her child returned. Her own fantasy– one I never thought I would be boring enough to share, let me add– is the one where everyone makes it home safe, everyone gets out alive. It’s a mundane daydream, maybe, but has its own wildness to it: remember how she yowled and chased after him when he ran out the door?

Shut out of Neverland, now I’m the Max who sits next to Alexander and makes a clumsy effort to apologize. And it’s not as much fun as throwing dirt, not even close. But I crossed that boundary a long time ago: if I were to make a blanket fort now, it’s not because I believe I can hide there.