Did you know the cult classic film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are almost never happened?

Well, first, it almost happened a bunch of times throughout the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and beyond, but never actually saw the light of day. For whatever reason, every attempt to bring the story of Max and his giant furry friends to the big screen just kept getting squashed.

In 1973, we got a taste for what a movie about Max’s adventures could look like when an animated short was released, mostly mirroring the book. It took five years to create, was narrated by Allen Swift, and the score was composed by the director of the short, Gene Deitch. But it still wasn’t the in-depth look at the story fans craved.

Where The Wild Things Are could have even been the first CGI animated film at Disney, more than a full decade before they eventually crossed over to computers with Toy Story in 1995. A team at Disney led by future Pixar animators created a computer-generated animation test of Where The Wild Things Are for Disney in 1983, mixing CGI backgrounds with hand-drawn characters to bring the beloved book to life. Unfortunately, the project would be canceled before we could see the final film.

In 2001, another animated adaptation almost made its way to theaters when Universal Studios secured the rights to the story, but they ultimately scrapped the film when it was about halfway completed. Somehow, no footage from the Universal adaptation has ever leaked.

Then, just a few short years later, the project was revived, this time as a live-action retelling of the children’s classic. Maurice Sendak was very involved in the adaptation process as a producer, and ultimately signed off on the selection of Spike Jonze as director, believing that he was maybe the only filmmaker on Earth who could see (and execute) his vision.

Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are looms much larger in our hearts and memories than it does on the shelf, where it doesn’t actually take up much space. The Caldecott Medal-winning picture book, which also features timeless artwork illustrated by the author himself, counts just 40 pages between its covers, which contain just 338 words organized into ten tidy sentences.

Though he had never penned a screenplay before, Spike Jonze and his co-writer Dave Eggers had the unique challenge of diving into Sendak’s briefly-described Wild Things world and expanding the efficient masterpiece into a full-length feature film. With frequent input from Sendak himself, Jonze and Eggers got to work on developing Max’s universe into something far more immersive.

As a producer of the film, Maurice Sendak had input on the story and final approval on how the Wild Things would look. It was Jim Henson’s legendary Creature Shop that was tasked with turning the beasts from the book into real, live, hulking monsters in the movie.

Just as important as how the Wild Things looked was how they sounded, and the cast for the film, from the live actors in Max’s real world to the voice cast in his imaginary one, was impeccable. Each representing one of the exploding emotions Max was feeling all pent up inside, the Wild Things are both frightening and endearing, and the actors who portrayed them did so beautifully. From a dry and reserved Paul Dano to a perfectly unhinged Moira…err… Catherine O’Hara, and anchored by a masterfully emotional performance from the late James Gandolfini as Carol, this ensemble was able to pull off one of the rare films that take the literary source material to new heights.

The film is beautiful yet terrifying at times, all at once chaotic and cathartic. But so is the mind of a child, especially one under immense stress without the experience or knowledge to understand proper coping mechanisms or meditation or anything as complex as what they’re dealing with, really. The Wild Things helped Max (and all of us) see our emotions and their consequences more clearly, as the wide variety of beasts they are.

Maurice Sendak passed away in 2012, just a few years after the film was released, and he was happy with it. His legacy lives on forever in this story and all of the others he gave to us, urging children and adults alike to travel to that far away island in our imagination where we can let our emotions run wild and live like a king. Long live Max.

Bonus Maurice Sendak and Spike Jonze Fun Fact: If you have the Blu-Ray edition of Where The Wild Things Are, or the Canadian DVD copy, you’ll find another live-action adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s work tucked into the special features. While production for Where The Wild Things Are was going on, Spike Jonze had an entirely separate crew work on a 23-minute short based on Sendak’s Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life, just for fun. The story is based on the imaginary adventures of Sendak’s dog, Jennie, who is voiced by none other than Meryl Streep in the short.