In defence of the new film, Michael Phillips, critic for the Chicago Tribune, has argued that it is grown-ups who are more disturbed by its darkness. “I suspect kids will go for it more than their parents; in my experience, it’s parents who tend to get fussed up about material they perceive, often wrongly, as ‘too dark’ or difficult. There’s a certain amount of pain in Where the Wild Things Are, but it’s completely earned. The movie fills you with all sorts of feelings, and I suspect children will recognise those feelings as their own,” he writes. In an article in this month’s edition of the journal The Psychologist, psychoanalyst Richard Gottlieb argues that this book and other works by Sendak are “fascinating studies of intense emotions – disappointment, fury, even cannibalistic rage – and their transformation through creative activity”.