Film version of Sendak's HIGGLETY PIGGLETY POP coming

The folks at /Film bring word that a 23-minute short film is in the works based on Maurice Sendak's classic book, Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life. Directed by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, the pair behind the Oscar-nominated short Madame Tutli-Putli, Higglety Pigglety Pop! is a mix of human actors and artful puppetry and features the voices of Meryl Streep and Forest Whitaker. There are some gorgeously strange clips on /Film but they're not embeddable, so instead I'll direct you to this clip from a 1980's stage opera adaptation of Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are that also features an excerpt of a Higglety Pigglety adaptation at the end. (This show was as fun to look at as it was painful to listen to.)

Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, but it's one of those books that reads one way when you're a child but has a very different tone when you go back to it as an adult. The story follows Jenny, an endearingly selfish and vain little dog who grows bored with her easy life with a loving master and runs away in search of adventure. It's all incredibly charming and silly in the best way, but when you read it as a grown-up, there are new and bittersweet resonances to Jenny's story.

Jenny was Sendak's actual dog, and he wrote the story as a tribute to her after she died. His love for her and sense of loss is there in the book, just beneath the surface of every page. After many trials and dangers, Jenny loses her way in the night and ends up falling asleep alone in a dark and cold forest, with a pile of leaves her only blanket. But then an unlikely turn of events sends her to a fabulous place, where she is surrounded by old friends, all of her most unlikely dreams come true and she is the celebrated artiste she always knew she could be. As a child you accept this happy ending without question. But as an adult, Jenny's fate is much more ambiguous. Did that sweet, dreamy little dog ever really leave the forest? Even as Sendak conjures up the perfect ending for the dog he loved so, you can't escape the feeling that Jenny's dream never ended.

Even as part of me wonders if the story needs to be adapted at all, the clips go a long way toward convincing me that the filmmakers know what they're doing. Higglety Pigglety Pop! will appear as an extra on the Where the Wild Things Are blu-ray.


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