ALL GREAT CHILDREN’S STORIES begin with a portal: a wardrobe, a rabbit hole, King’s Cross platform 9¾. This is because children want a mixture of the magic and the mundane — they want Harry to live in Privet Drive but to go to Hogwarts — and they need to know how to pass between the two. They want to be able to go, but they also want to be able to come back. The most obvious portal, however — a child’s bedroom, the place where they go to dream — has been used significantly only once in my memory — in Maurice Sendak’s picturebook Where The Wild Things Are, which has been commissioned as a movie this week, to be directed by Spike Jonze with a script by Dave Eggers.

It is interesting, the ultra-hipness of that pairing, the ultra-sophistication, in a sense, the ultra-adultness of it, with regard to a children’s movie. But Where The Wild Things Are has a hipper past than most children’s books: it was banned by many libraries on its publication in 1963; the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim denounced it as too disturbing and it could not since have been subjected to more deconstructive and psychoanalytical theorising had it been written by Jacques Lacan.

For those who don’t know, it’s a simple story (338 words — surely the shortest story to be made into a film) about Max, a badly behaved boy in a wolf suit, who is sent to his room without any supper. The room then transforms into a forest, then an ocean and finally an island inhabited by four toothy, horned, weird-haired, monstrous Wild Things. Max is able to control them, eventually becoming King of the Wild Things himself and directing their Wild Rumpus. However, he then feels lonely and, despite the Wild Things’ protestations, returns to his room where his supper is waiting for him, still hot.

The key to Sendak’s success, and to the continuing hipness of his book, is that its hero is not a good child: he is in every sense a bad boy, semi-feral, half boy, half wolf. The Wild Things, although based on various immigrant relations who came to stay at the Sendak house during his childhood, are clearly representations of Max’s inner demons, and their “rumpus” — six pages of textless dancing, including what appears to be some kind of pagan moon-worship — is as much an amoral celebration of these demons as a taming of them. The amorality is central: Max is not morally redeemed in the story and needs to do little work to come back — there is none of that excruciating sense of a spiritual journey home that turgidly drives most fairytales.

Wherever the Wild Things are, it is decidedly not Narnia. Some of the same instinct is there in C. S. Lewis’s parable — the idea that an entire alternative reality exists within the immediate furnishings of children’s lives, the plasticity of space and time, the wonderment that borders on nightmare — but all of this is locked down by the moral and religious underpinning of the story so that, by the end, all childishness is lost in a rigidly adult dichotomy of good versus evil.

As with Max, when the Narnia children return, virtually no time has passed, but unlike him, in the interim they have grown up, become figures of authority, kings and queens, and there is a sense that they will carry this growth back into their childhood. However, we know that Max has learnt virtually nothing and is almost certain to disobey his mother the next time that she tells him to take off his wolf suit. The book is, in fact, extraordinarily childcentric — no adults are pictured, Max has only to decide something for it to be so, and the entire narrative seems to take place within the time that it takes for his rage at being sent to his room to diminish. It is a book written for and about terrible infants, the kind of terrible infants that most children really are and that all adults remain for much of the time; thus it continues to appeal to such enfants terribles as Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers.

P. S. I was so convinced of Where The Wild Things Are’s ability to speak directly to children that I read it last night to my four-year-old daughter, hoping that she would say something about it which I could use that would be miraculously insightful, in a kind of “out of the mouth of babes” way, for this column.

What she said was: “Yes, I heard this story in nursery before, but it was on a tape; I can’t remember what was on the other side of the tape, because it was ages ago, when I was 3.” Oh well.

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