Adapting a beloved children’s book for the screen is a difficult task. Adapting a beloved picture book, famous as much for its vivid illustrations as for its spartan plot, is considerably more challenging. Doing it while answering to an increasingly skeptical studio, whose moneymen are convinced that you’re squandering their investment on an expensive art film that’s too childish for adults and too bizarre for children — well, that’s a real test of a director’s mettle.

It’s a test that Spike Jonze has passed. His version of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, five difficult years in the making, is …