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Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, a 90-minute adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 43-year-old children’s book which barely spans a handful of pages, is a thing of absolute beauty. It is beautiful in cinematography, beautiful in performance and dialogue, and beautiful in silent moments between every wild thing that occurs onscreen. It’s a family film that doesn’t pander or refrain from asking the questions every child is bound to ask, but will also implore its adult audience to reconsider the answers they’ve made to those questions many moons before.

It’s somewhat unbelievable to me that I live in an era of film in which the last three “big” films engineered for children — by which I mean this film, Wall-E, and Up — have had the gall to treat kids like adults. Wall-E is a search for love and belonging, Up deals with mortality in ways that Shrek The Fourth will probably never dream of.

And Wild Things joins those two in delivering an assessment of a child, a depiction of what it is like to be a youth such as Max (Max Records), who is ruled by his id and is yet struck down by a society that doesn’t seem to understand him. In many ways, Jonze delivers far more than he was ever required to by signing on to this project: he’s painted a vivid picture of youth’s anger, and the subtle experience of feeling dissociated from a world that’s spinning on an entirely different axis than the one that any child would rather be a part of — one of lava monsters and rocket ships and secret hideouts.

Max’s analog in the world of the Wild Things is Carol, played perfectly by James Gandolfini. Like Max, he’s a character that is ruled by dual desires: one to belong, and the other to engineer a world around him that he would want to feel a part of. The dynamic between these two characters is the beating heart of the film, and leads us from the slowest, darkest moments into the frenetic scenes hinted at in the trailers. Where the Wild Things Are is a film that will be called “slow”, and for good reason — it takes its time from moment to moment, dwelling in a variety of emotions in a manner as scattershot as they are felt in a child.

Gandolfini is surrounded by some great performances from Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano, Catherine O’ Hara, Chris Cooper and Forest Whitaker, as well as Catherine Keener and a completely thankless cameo by Mark Ruffalo. But the real showcase here is Records, who I hope goes on to a vibrant career — the boy is perfect as the fictional Max, from first scene to last, and will single-handedly evoke about 90% of the tears from invested audiences.

The film was co-written by Jonze and Dave Eggers, and the script shows a remarkable knack for engineering each of the Wild Things to display the inner workings of Max’s mind — everything that they say is either directly correlated to Max’s own thoughts, or his interpretation of those he doesn’t understand in the human world.

My only qualms with Where the Wild Things Are, which excels brilliantly on a level of aesthetics and tone, would be in the uneven pacing of the film, which prevents it from perfection. Certain characters that are obviously engineered for cutesy-ness are introduced midway into the picture, and while they are cute, I sort of wish that they’d save that time for more moments with our central characters.

However, this is a pretty minor complaint with a very excellent film, and it will certainly be a momentous film for a generation of film-goers who are about to be exposed to it. Both parent and child alike will benefit from the experience that Jonze and Sendak have created — an impressionistic and beautifully drawn piece of inseparable childhood fears and imagination.