Maurice Sendak's IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN adapted by Gene Deitch

Celebrated children's book author Maurice Sendak has always had a dark, surreal quality to his art, as anybody who ever read Where the Wild Things Are knows. But his 1970 book In the Night Kitchen is pretty strange stuff, even by Sendak's standards. (Click the image at left to buy In the Night Kitchen (Caldecott Collection)

Inspired by Winsor McCay's classic comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, the book follows a little boy named Mickey who is sleeping in bed when he is awakened and somehow loses all of his clothes as he drifts to a magical place known as the Night Kitchen. There he falls into a pot of batter being mixed by three portly, mustachioed bakers who all look like Oliver Hardy. The bakers keep on mixing the batter with Mickey inside, and they are just about to put him in a "Mickey oven" when he emerges from the batter to protest that he is not their milk. Now wearing a suit made of batter, he creates a bread dough airplane and uses it to fly into the mouth of an enormous milk bottle. There his batter suit crumbles away, he pours the milk down to the bakers so they can finish their cake, and finally he returns home.

The book has been very controversial over the years, mostly because Mickey spends much of the book naked. And this isn't one of those Austin Powers-esque situations where he is "naked" but he's always strategically covered by a potted fern or something. The kid is really naked. (Over the years the book has been banned many times, and some librarians have even tried to "fix" it by drawing shorts on Mickey themselves.) Critics have seen a lot of sexual symbolism in the story, and it's hard to deny the Freudian quality of the book's imagery.

Sendak has long denied that there's anything sexual about the book at all, but in a 2003 interview on NPR's Fresh Air he offered an even more disturbing interpretation, saying that Mickey's adventure with the three bakers was actually a Holocaust allegory! The "Micky oven" and the Hitler-esque mustaches of the three bakers arguably support this notion... But then why does Mickey seem to have such a jolly time with the bakers? If the three men are meant to symbolize Nazis, why do they end up being so benign?

Below you can see Gene Deitch's animated adaptation of the story. It's surprisingly faithful to the book. It appears on Where the Wild Things Are... and 5 More Stories by Maurice Sendak, a DVD featuring animated version of some of Sendak's most famous stories, a few of them directed by Sendak himself. (Note that film below does feature some nudity, however innocent.)















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