A young boy named Mickey sleeps in his bed when he is disturbed by noise on a lower floor. Suddenly, he begins to float, and loses all of his clothes as he drifts into a surreal world called the "Night Kitchen". He falls naked into a giant mixing pot that contains the batter for the "morning cake". While Mickey is buried in the mass, three identical bakers (who closely resemble Oliver Hardy) mix the batter and prepare it for baking, unaware (or unconcerned) that there is a little boy inside. Just before the baking pan is placed into the oven, the boy emerges from the pan, protesting that he is not the batter's milk. To make up for the baking ingredient deficiency, Mickey (now covered in batter from the neck down) constructs an airplane out of bread dough so he can use the measuring cup as a hat and fly to the mouth of a gigantic milk bottle. Upon reaching the bottle's opening, he dives in and briefly revels in the liquid. After his covering of batter disintegrates, making him naked again, he pours the needed milk in a cascade down to the bakers who joyfully finish making their morning cake. With dawn breaking, the naked Mickey crows like a rooster and slides down the side of the bottle, back into his bed, where he is magically clothed again, "cake free and dried".

One night Max puts on his wolf suit and makes mischief of one kind and another, so his mother calls him 'Wild Thing' and sends him to bed without his supper. That night a forest begins to grow in Max's room and an ocean rushes by with a boat to take Max to the place where the wild things are. Max tames the wild things and crowns himself as their king, and then the wild rumpus begins. But when Max has sent the monsters to bed, and everything is quiet, he starts to feel lonely and realises it is time to sail home to the place where someone loves him best of all. When Maurice Sendak won the American Library Association's Caldecott Medal for WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, he said: 'Max, the hero of my book, discharges his anger against his mother, and returns to the real world sleepy, hungry and at peace with himself...from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustration as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.'