HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON - Mark Reviews Movies

Harold and the Purple Crayon, Columbia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 2, 2024

At the very start, there's the briefest bit of innocence in Harold and the Purple Crayon. It's a straightforward introduction to and explanation of Crockett Johnson's 1955 children's book, animated in the simple style of the author's illustrations. For those who don't know it, the book and its sequels tell the story of Harold, a young kid who uses his imagination and a magical crayon to create anything he wants. Based on the fact that only one character in the movie adaptation is aware of the book's existence, even the movie thinks that the number of those unfamiliar with the material will be high.

It doesn't matter, ultimately, because this story imagines a grown-up Harold, first in an animation style that's much busier and flashier, losing the simple charm of Johnson's drawings, and later in the real world as real-life human played by Zachary Levi. Well, he's supposed to be an actual person, but as written by screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman, the adult Harold is a running joke that collapses quickly and spends the rest of the movie on the ground, furiously kicking its legs.

Harold's meant to be stuck, it seems, in a kind of arrested development, meaning he thinks, speaks, and acts as a child. His reason for leaving his created world for the real one is to find his creator, the narrator (voiced by Alfred Molina) who either controls or comments upon Harold's actions. One day, the god-like voice simply stops, so Harold, along with his best friends Moose and Porcupine, decides to draw a door to the real world in order to find out what has happened to the man who created him.

The basic idea of this is intriguing, if only because the existential conundrum and doubts implied by Harold's journey seem like a lot for a kids' story about a man-child with a magic crayon. Fear not, timid parents, because Harold is immediately mocked for wearing an ill-fitting onesie and beaten by an older man with a cane upon entering the real world. The movie's intentions are purely and insipidly comical.

It's a lazy comedy, which is bad enough, but director Carlos Saldanha's movie is also an unimaginative one, which is worse when the whole story and message revolve around the power of imagination. The adult Harold is naïve to the point of being dull and dumb, somehow knowing enough of the real world to draw and somehow fly an airplane but ignorant enough of the basics to need a kid explain what death is. The notion of the character is inconsistent, and Levi's consistently goofy performance only highlights how little thought has been put into the character.

Nobody here really cares about imagination. As proof, there are those friends, who are drawings of a moose and a porcupine in the world of the book. In the real world, Moose and Porcupine are strangely transformed into human beings, played by Lil Rel Howery and Tanya Reynolds respectively.

Why does this happen? It's never explained, but one supposes it was to save money on the visual effects (Moose turns into a digital moose when he's scared, but Porcupine stays a human throughout) and to allow for a couple of comedic sidekicks to our joke of a protagonist. Why does Harold need funny partners if he's supposed to be funny himself? That's probably a deeper question about the movie's existence than any of the intentionally existential ones teased within the story.

The plot is just as formulaic. Harold and Moose meet (after being hit by their car) and stay with Terry (Zooey Deschanel) and her young son Mel (Benjamin Bottani), who sees Harold draw a replacement tire for a flat with his crayon. Harold tells the kid to keep it a secret from his mother, even though he spends the rest of the movie trying to tell Terry about his magical powers but stops because he misinterprets her comments about his possible mental-health issues as her literally not wanting to know about the crayon. Beyond the contrivance, these are bad lessons—a random adult telling a child to keep a secret from a parent and a parent letting two people who, to her, seem to be suffering a mental-health crisis stay in the family home—for kids on a fundamental level.

Anyway, Harold looks for his creator, summons things into existence with the crayon (People are surprisingly calm and unfazed when they witness this), gets into some allegedly wacky shenanigans, and ultimately has to duel with a forced villain, librarian and struggling fantasy author Gary (Jemaine Clement). Harold and the Purple Crayon is a tiresome display of a near-complete absence of imagination.

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