As beautiful as you’d expect and possibly even more exciting. Feast your eyes.

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Needless to say, the film looks absolutely amazing.

Adapted from the classic children's book by Maurice Sendak.

Many fans of the book, like myself, probably grew up to be Spike Jonze fans and have been waiting patiently for this film’s release. Rumors of development troubles have plagued the film since its release date was pushed back from last year. Jonze’s adaptation, which he co-wrote with author Dave Eggers, was reportedly deemed “too adult” by Warner Bros.

“I think that’s what freaked the studio out about the movie,” says Jonze. “It wasn’t a studio film for kids, or it wasn’t a traditional film about kids. We didn’t have like a Movie Kid in our movie, or a Movie Performance in a Movie Kid world. We had a real kid and a real world, and I think that’s sort of where our problem was.

A stunning still from Jonze's forthcoming live-action film.

In the end they realized the movie is what it is, and there’s no real way to… it’s sort of like they were expecting a boy and I gave birth to a girl. So they just needed their time to sort that out and figure out how they were going to learn to love their new daughter.”

The “real kid” filling in the role here as Movie Kid is newcomer Max Records. The rest of the cast, however, is as star-studded as one would expect from a Jonze film: Catherine Keener as Max’s mom, and featuring the voice work of James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker, Paul Dano, Catherine O’Hara and Lauren Ambrose. Adding to its star power, the film is also produced by Playtone’s Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, and scored by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Warner Bros. picked up the movie from Universal, which did not see eye-to-eye with the author of the classic 1963 children’s book Maurice Sendak on the concept of the film.

The 338-word book was adapted by Jonze and Dave Eggers.

Of the current vision, Sendak told The New York Times in October: “I am in love with it. If Spike and Dave do not do this movie now, I would just as soon not see any version of it ever get made.”

“Yeah, I think this one I just wanted to… from the beginning, I wanted it to feel a certain way,” says Jonze. “I wanted it to feel “real,” or not-real because it’s not “real,” I wanted it to feel like… like when I was a kid, and I would play with my Star Wars action figures, or read Maurice’s books and imagine me being Mickey in IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN, or whatever it was… it felt like it was everything, you know? It’s like your imagination is so convincing to yourself that… you’re there, you’re in it. And I wanted this movie to take it as seriously as kids take their imagination and not, like, fantasy it up. So I think it just started from that feeling, that it could feel like you were there with them, like Max was there with them, and not just in some fantasy movie.”

We simply cannot wait.

Click here for the (very long) interview with Jonze on Aint It Cool News.

Where the Wild Things Are is set for release October 16, 2009.

Tell us what you think. Will it be better than Tim Burton’s Willy Wonka? Will it live up to when you first read the book as a kid?