In that Times Magazine profile, Jonze -- who co-wrote the movie with Dave Eggers -- said, "Everything we did, all the decisions that we made, were to try to capture the feeling of what it is to be 9." That should set off the warning bells. And sure enough, "Where the Wild Things Are" is filled with the aggressively childlike sense of wonder that only adults can feel. As Annie Dillard wrote, "Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous."

In other words, children may be too sophisticated -- too busy being actual children -- for "Where the Wild Things Are." This isn't a straight adaptation of Sendak's book, which would be impossible, given that it consists of 10 sentences of text. Instead, Jonze uses the source material as a springboard to explore the insecurities and the freeing pleasures of being a child. As the movie opens, young Max (played by serene-looking child actor Max Records), dressed in a furry monster jumpsuit, chases the family dog with a fork. Shortly thereafter, we see that he's a confused, lonely child who talks to fences. He's enormously proud of the igloo he's built in the family's snowy yard -- then his sister (Pepita Emmerichs) and her friends destroy it in what starts out as a good-natured snowball fight. Jonze clues us in, subtly, that Max's parents are divorced; his mother (Catherine Keener) appears to be dating someone she likes (played by Mark Ruffalo, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it performance). Max sees them snuggling on the couch, and shortly thereafter acts out when she starts to get his supper ready. He stands on the table in his sneakered feet and roars, "Woman, feed me!" an open acknowledgment of the savagery of children, and the ways in which they're aware of gender roles even before they really know what the heck gender is.

Then Max bites his mother, and she screams at him. He runs from the house, fast and far in the darkness, leaving the best part of the movie -- a framing device that actually does get at some of the simmering anger of childhood -- behind him. He finds a boat and sets sail into the night, eventually reaching a forest where he comes upon a group of shaggy, mammothy creatures lumbering about, arguing and destroying stuff.

Max persuades these curious beasts that he's a king with special powers. And then he gets to know them, even though their personalities seem somewhat interchangeable. There's the devoted, kvetching couple, Ira and Judith (Catherine O'Hara and Forest Whitaker); KW (Lauren Ambrose), the girl-beast who has committed heresy by going outside this tight-knit circle to make friends with some owls (whom she at one point stones, playfully, on a beach, explaining that they like it). Other gruff fuzzy-wuzzies speak with the voices of Paul Dano and Chris Cooper. But the wild thing to whom Max becomes closest is Carol (James Gandolfini), a shy, bright, idealistic behemoth given to confused, jealous tantrums.

These are all somber, sensitive creatures, with low self-esteem and low expectations -- EMOnsters, perhaps. Max develops a half-warm, half-uneasy relationship with them (they occasionally hint that under normal circumstances, they'd have long ago eaten him), and he suggests that together they build their own Utopia, and if anyone they don't like dares to enter, he or she will have his or her brain cut out automatically.

At this point you may be wondering how Sendak's compact, joyously freeing and slightly scary tale gave birth to such a wriggly nonstory, and it's a valid question. This is Jonze's first picture since his pretentious and self-indulgent meta-movie "Adaptation," and only his third altogether. (The first was the intriguing but not necessarily deep "Being John Malkovich.") Warner Bros., the studio behind "Where the Wild Things Are," was reportedly unhappy with the results of an early test screening, in which some of the little tykes in the audience cried and begged to be removed from the theater.

That right there is enough to make me urge any filmmaker to stick to his vision. It isn't, unfortunately, enough to make me like his movie. "Where the Wild Things Are" may be a childlike picture, but it isn't an innocent one. The movie is so loaded with adult ideas about childhood -- as opposed to things that might delight or engage an actual child -- that it comes off as a calculated, petulant shout, the kind of trick kids play to guilt-trip their parents into paying attention to them. It appears to be a movie made by, and for, members of a generation who feel it's unfair to have to grow up. Jonze isn't channeling the feelings of 9-year-olds so much as he's obsessively fingering his own, like the silky edge of a blanket. "Who cares about the children?" is Jonze's sulky rhetorical question. "What about me?"

That would be OK, if "Where the Wild Things Are" had any dramatic momentum, or any real emotional core. Often, the best movies are deeply personal for the people who've made them. But there's a difference between a personal work and one that stammers and shuffles and looks down at its shoes, now and then making a muttering, sideways observation about the tragedy of childhood. Jonze tries to give the movie a bigger social context -- characters utter deep truths about rulers not being able to keep all the people happy all of the time -- but mostly, his vision is just a jumble. He and Eggers have etched out a story that's probably supposed to be charmingly primitive but is mostly just tedious. If this were a storybook and not a movie, one page might read "And then they all ran through the forest, hooting and hollering," followed by another that reads "And then they all ran to the cliff by the sea, hooting and hollering," followed by the slightly more exciting "And then they all threw dirt clods at one another, hooting and hollering." The hooting and hollering is aided and abetted by rambunctious, raucous little songs by New York's downtown darling Karen O. of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; the quieter moments get introspective, ghostly melodies by Carter Burwell. But Jonze is too obviously using the music to alternately rev us up and slow us down, instead of letting the movie's images, and its action, set the pace.

There's no doubt about the grand ambitions of "Where the Wild Things Are." The production design (by K.K. Barrett), the cinematography (by Lance Acord) and the creatures (made by the Jim Henson Co.) succeed, to a degree, in evoking the glorious, scritchy-scratchy crosshatching of Sendak's illustrations. But these costly beasties and expensive special effects are too often put to ill use, in scenes that are pointless or simply boring: At one point Carol and Max wander through a desert, having an existential conversation about whether or not the sun might someday die. Why not just borrow an outtake from Gus Van Sant's "Gerry" and be done with it?

Jonze grasps at many wispy truths in "Where the Wild Things Are": Families are, to an extent, dictatorships, and that's just the way it is. No one can be responsible for making everyone happy. It's frustrating to be a kid, which is why kids need to run and yell and get their ya-yas out. But Jonze's ideas, visual and otherwise, spill out in a faux-philosophical ramble that isn't nearly as deep as he thinks it is; at best, it's a scrambled tone poem. Even the look of the picture becomes tiresome after a while -- it starts to seem depressive and shaggy and tired, as if Sid and Marty Krofft had forgotten to take their meds. Jonze has said that he was thinking of Cassavetes movies as he wrote the dialogue for "Where the Wild Things Are." A child is waiting, and he wants his money back.

Now, first of all, Jonze and Eggers are the men for the job, and if anybody can pull off such an impossible project without eviscerating the Sendak spirit, it'd be them. (I'm grateful that Tim Burton didn't get his clawed, furry paws into this one.) But that doesn't vitiate the marketing questions that obsess industry-watchers: Who is "Where the Wild Things Are" meant for, and who will show up to see it?

I make no predictions about whether "Wild Things" is a smashola, an "Ishtar"-scale bomb or somewhere not quite satisfyingly in between. (OK, yes I do: I'll go with the smart money on Door No. 3.) But it isn't exactly a children's movie, definitely isn't a teenage movie and doesn't look anything like anybody's conception of a grown-up movie. I guess its core demographic is the winsome kidult crowd who cling to childhood memories of Sendak's classic with an almost tragic fondness -- and we'll have to see how large that audience is.

Whatever "Wild Things" does or does not do, artistically and commercially, it already belongs to a genre: Kids' Movies That Aren't Really for Kids. I mean, children's entertainment has included knowing winks at adult viewers as long as it's existed -- check out the jokes about marital life and Freudian psychology in Walt Disney's 1940s Donald Duck shorts, if you don't believe me -- but what we've seen in recent decades is a little different.

I'm talking about movies that either accidentally or deliberately embody a fundamentally adult understanding of the world, an ironic or tragic or frankly frightening picture of life that will either terrify the youngest viewers or sail right over their heads. Relying on suggestions from friends, perusal of other people's lists and my own experience as a parent and one-time child, here's a provisional top 10. We want more!

"Spirited Away" Now, I must admit that when I compiled a list of reader suggestions for the Awesome Kids Video Project (summer '08), Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki's fable about a young girl's voyage into the land of the dead was an exceedingly popular entry. Maybe this movie, like most of Miyazaki's work, plays differently to child and adult audiences. The creepy-sad nuances -- like the recognition that one's parents do indeed die eventually, and journeys through haunted amusement parks won't bring them back -- pretty much evade younger viewers. That said, this movie thrums some deep, archetypal strings, and troubled me for days afterward. My kids love "Kiki's Delivery Service" and "My Neighbor Totoro," but I ain't going here.

"The Nightmare Before Christmas" Too obvious a choice? Maybe. Any parent who shows this movie to a little kid is asking for it -- it's got the word "nightmare" in the title! Of course, animator Henry Selick's breakthrough isn't meant as a kids' movie at all. It's the defining work of a semi-new kidult genre that combines grotesquerie with sweetness, a genre closely linked to the career of kidult pioneer Tim Burton (who produced and co-wrote this movie).

"Wall-E" I'm appending an asterisk here, and the footnote says that we're really talking about the entire Pixar catalog, with the exception of "Cars" and maybe "Toy Story." It's not that Pixar's flicks don't connect with the tot set, but especially as the company has aged its work has assumed an ever more ruminative and rueful tone. With this post-apocalyptic fable, loaded with sardonic asides about our consumer-excess society, followed by "Up" (which is something close to a tragic meditation on mortality), you'd have to say that Pixar has entered a new phase. These are fairy tales for grown-ups, and especially for parents, with just enough candy coating that kids will tolerate them.

"Fantastic Planet" Travel with us now back to the hedonistic early 1970s, when some parents were persuaded that a French animated film set on a planet where 50-foot superior beings keep humans as pets, was appropriate for children. I suppose the kids didn't actually comprehend the erotic and/or sadomasochistic elements of the story, but troubled dreams ensued. Absolutely gorgeous animation by René Laloux, but in 2009 this movie would freak out plenty of adults.

"Coraline" Sure, Henry Selick gets another entry. This adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novella arguably isn't as scary as the book, but its sinister, sub-Freudian elements -- the evil alternate mom who wants to replace Coraline's eyes with buttons; the passage between worlds through a throbbing, glowing tunnel -- still seem to spring from somewhere way down deep.

"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (2005) and/or "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" (1971) Which one of these adaptations of Roald Dahl's classic is most completely demented, grotesque and inappropriate for children? Take your pick, really. It's interesting about Dahl -- there's a diabolical intelligence that's often close to cruelty in his books, but he understands childhood psychology so well, and plays favorites so shamelessly, that most of the time kids find his stories delightful-terrifying rather than simply terrifying. Something about the more detached, neutral perspective of a film -- or, anyway, of these two films -- makes Dahl's already gruesome fable of candy-capitalism seem downright sadistic.

"The Witches" Speaking of Roald Dahl, let's take one of his most malicious books, cast it with a pile of art-house-type actresses (Anjelica Huston, Brenda Blethyn, Mai Zetterling) and hand it over to Nicolas Roeg, director of "Don't Look Now" and "Performance"! Given all that, this story about a small boy (who's been turned into a mouse) trying to defang an immense witchly conspiracy wasn't really marketed as a kids' movie on its 1990 release. But who was it for, then? A classic in-between, neither-nor, which is ripe for rediscovery.

"The Dark Crystal" This Tolkienesque quest fantasy from 1982 was unleashed on lots of small children, pretty much on the basis that it had puppets and was co-directed by Muppet creator Jim Henson. Judging from my mailbox, many of those kids loved it, while others peed their Underoos in terror. Along with several other animated films of the same era -- most notably "The NeverEnding Story" and "The Secret of NIMH" -- "Dark Crystal" helped define the fantasy-oriented kidult demographic.

"Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" There's definitely an argument that this big-budget 1968 musical belongs on some other list -- misbegotten movies that aim at a mass market and don't wind up really working for anybody-- but I can't resist it. Ian Fleming's laborious children's book was entrusted to Roald Dahl (there he is again!) as screenwriter, and the end result runs 144 minutes. I say again: Children were asked to sit there in the dark for two and a half hours, alternately being bored by Dick Van Dyke's cheerful, pompous overacting and terrified by Robert Helpmann's leering, sadistic "Child Catcher."

"Gremlins" I know, I must be kidding, right? One of the greatest kids' movies of all time! Well, sure. But it's for kids who already relish the idea of destroying the humdrum world around them, but haven't yet discovered the musical and/or chemical subcultures of teenage life. And "Gremlins" is undeniably also for those of us who have outgrown such things -- who long to cram all the pots and pans in the microwave and turn it on, but are, alas, late for work. Small children, with their inherent desire for stability and order, have reportedly been reduced to shivering, trembling wrecks by this movie. No doubt it did them good.