How did he get a new perspective on them? I didn't see this at all. He reacts to the situations with the monsters no differently than how he did at home, except with the monsters he actually has power, whereas at home, his childish ideas are ignored.
But he gets outside of those emotions -- for example, when consoling the goatlike one who complains of always being ignored, or when seeing that the main one has destroyed his toothpick landscape the way that Max had destroyed the popsicle-stick heart he made for his sister -- rather than being controlled by them.
Was there ever a question in his mind that they weren't? Has he never gotten mad before? Seems to me that a kid as mischevious as Max, who wears a Wolf costume, who is obviously attention-seeking, has many many times experienced wild emotions and they're already a part of him.
Again, I never saw this as sometihing he didn't already know. Max is a child, but not an infant. He goes to school, he has a sibling, he already knows people can fight and fall out and it not be a permanent situation.
I don't know. I said I thought the movie was interesting, not a masterpiece, so I'm really not up for defending it endlessly. But I don't think the movie was intended to depict some singularly life-changing experience, as if Max never had any inkling about any of this stuff until that one fateful night. No, I think it was simply showing, in metaphorical terms, the way that kids gradually learn to handle emotions as they grow up. Small children (younger than Max) really don't know how to handle their emotions, and as they mature they get better at it, but even adults do it imperfectly.
One flaw I saw in the movie is that the actor who played Max seemed a little too old for the part. The plot about dealing with emotions might make more sense with a younger child, and in fact the kid in the book appears younger. But he was a good actor, and I'm sure it would be hard to get a 5-year-old to carry a movie.
Here's an excerpt from a NYT piece that describes it fairly well:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/movies/08scot.htmlMr. Jonze’s film, extrapolated from a few hundred words and a dozen or so illustrations by Maurice Sendak — not uncontroversial in their own right, by the way — is dense with difficult emotions. The hero, Max, is often angry and lonely, frustrated when his sister neglects him and jealous when his divorced mother spends time with her boyfriend. The depiction of Max’s home life and his impulsive, aggressive behavior seem almost designed to provoke disapproval from some concerned, hypercritical party or another, even if those opening scenes of domestic chaos also elicit a flicker of pained recognition.
But like Dorothy before him, who found in Oz some of the same characters she’d left back in Kansas, Max escapes to an enchanted world that looks a lot like home. The furry, talking creatures who give the movie its name are strikingly grouchy, quarrelsome and passive-aggressive. They whine, they pout, they manipulate, they break things and hurt one another for no good reason. One of them makes a big deal about her cool new friends, who turn out to be a pair of terrified owls. Others use self-deprecation as a way to feel special, or deploy aggression to mask insecurity.
They act, in short, just like people and turn to Max, a human child in a wolf suit who proclaims himself a king, to deliver them from their humanity. The love between ruler and subjects is mutual, but so is the disillusionment that rounds off Max’s sojourn on the island and sends him back across the sea to his mother. No place is free of conflict and bad feeling, and no person has the power to make problems disappear. Where there is happiness — friendship, adventure, affection, security — there is also, inevitably, disappointment. That’s life.
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