How They Made 'Where the Wild Things Are'

On Gene Deitch's 1975 hit.

A still from the animated Where the Wild Things Are (1975)

Welcome! We’re looking at Where the Wild Things Are, and the art of the animated picture book, in this issue of Animation Obsessive.

Lovely films come out of books for children (we covered some new examples on Sunday). It’s a tradition: the Peter Rabbit series of the ‘90s, the Oscar-nominated Doctor De Soto of the ‘80s, the UPA Madeline of the ‘50s.

Adapting these books takes a special touch. Gene Deitch, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 95, was an artist who had it. He spent decades of his career doing picture book films like The Three Robbers and A Picture for Harold’s Room — and, most of all, his animated version of Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things.

As Deitch wrote, Sendak made the “Mount Everest of picture books, and we had to film it simply because it was there.”¹

Today, we’re exploring how it happened. Let’s go!