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Max Records and two co-stars in “Where the Wild Things Are." More Photos >

A FEW weekends ago I sat near the back of the biggest theater in my local multiplex, part of a packed house watching Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are.” The film had just opened to reviews that ranged from grouchy to ecstatic, and to quite a bit of hand wringing about its dark, sad, scary or otherwise non-child-appropriate content. There was a lot of speculation too about the size, composition and receptivity of the audience. Would children embrace it? Would adults be scared off? Who was this movie — so melancholy in its whimsy, so rueful in its sentiment — really meant for?

I had already seen “Wild Things” once, but I wanted at least a sliver of anecdotal evidence to support my own hunches about its effect on viewers of various ages. My children were a little too old to serve as ideal research subjects, a role to which they had long since resigned themselves. Tweener and teenager that they are (it happened so fast!), they were also, at first, a little reluctant to see a film that seemed to be pitched either at 5-year-old graduates of progressive nursery schools or at 25-year-old graduates of progressive liberal arts colleges. But in the end they were surprised at how much they liked what they saw and impressed by how “emo” the movie turned out to be.

Which is, in a way, the nub of the interesting controversy that has enveloped “Where the Wild Things Are,” and expanded into the latest wide-ranging adult argument about the feelings of children. Parents, most of whom want their kids to be both adventurous and protected, comfortable and sophisticated, tend to worry a lot about (and to judge one another by) how much and what kinds of movies children should see. On Friday the argument will shift to Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” about an unrepentant poultry killer, and in the meantime there is Disney’s “Christmas Carol,” which is both a pretty scary ghost story and a rather stern Victorian lesson in the fear of death.

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