Harold and the Purple Crayon (2024) review

Dir. Carlos Saldanha

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★

The 1955 children’s book, Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, coupled with the lovely albeit short-lived HBO Family show in 2001, was a beautiful ode to childlike wonder and imagination. Its paper-thin premise involved a cute little boy who had the power to make anything come to life with his magical purple crayon. Johnson’s illustrations were simple yet wondrous, and I can still remember being a child, arrested by the television series with its unpredictable creations and soothing music.

Silly me for believing a film adaptation of the series that’s been in development since Christ lost his sandals would be something worth seeing.

At one point in the 1990s, a Harold and the Purple Crayon film was to be helmed by the man who went on to direct James and the Giant Peach. Then, in 2010, my excitement beamed when I heard that Sony Pictures Animation and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment was involved in adapting an animated movie based on Johnson’s book. Years passed. Nothing materialized. Then, in the year 2024, here it is: the live-action adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon exactly nobody asked for, which serves as the worst of its kind since Diary of a Wimpy Kid 14 years ago.

Oscar-nominated director Carlos Saldanha (Ferdinand), hopelessly bound to one bad boardroom decision after another, begins with an animated speed-run through Johnson’s book with Alfred Molina narrating. Harold is a little boy who goes on adventures with the help of his crayon; whatever he sketches becomes real. Time then passes to show an adult Harold (still animated) spending his days with two animal sidekicks, Moose and Porcupine. Between adventures, Harold enjoys conversing with his unseen creator/father/God-figure, who suddenly stops responding one morning. Doing only what he knows best, Harold draws a door to the real world and goes searching for him. Now, the actual movie starts, unfortunately.

Harold enters the real-world an adult man-boy played by Zachary Levi, still visibly heartbroken over the failure of Shazam 2, if you look closely enough. For reasons writers David Guion and Michael Handelman never care to explain, Moose and Porcupine turn into Lil Rel Howery and Tayna Reynolds, respectively, upon entering our world. Sometimes when Moose is scared, he turns back into a moose. Porcupine never reverts to her original form. Damn you if you want a dose of logic in this already inexplicable bastardization of children’s entertainment.

Harold’s purple crayon still works in the real world, so it’s not long before he’s sketching pies, ice cream, bicycles, airplanes, and other nonsense. Harold and Moose get quasi-adopted by a single mother (Zooey Deschanel), whose son Mel (Benjamin Bottani), who is gripped by his own boundless sense of imagination, particularly in the crazy creatures he sketches. Meanwhile, Porcupine spends most of the film lost.

Harold’s quest to find his creator leads him to a failed literary author known as “Library Gary” (Jermaine Clement). Instead of marveling at the fact that Harold and his companions have come from a work of fiction, he instead tries to steal Harold’s crayon so he can bring his unpublished manuscript to life.

For a film predicated upon the power of imagination, Harold and the Purple Crayon has astonishingly little of it. Harold creates many things with his titular utensil, but none of it sparks wonder. The lack of inspiration derives from the fact that this material was born to be animated, and the drawer of such creations was, appropriately, a little boy coming to grips with the power of his own mind. That subtext dissolves when the purple crayon is in the hands of someone pushing 40, and before you even make the comparison, nothing in Guion and Handelman’s script comes remotely close to the thematic power of Barbie.

There’s precisely one good scene and one good needle-drop to be found. The sequence happens in an Ollie’s grocery store, where Terry, without option, leaves her shift in the hands of Harold and Moose. Chaos ensues, capsizing when Harold draws a propeller on top of a coin-operated helicopter, sending a kid, and eventually his mom and an old lady, into mid-air. The aforementioned song is Apollo 440’s “Stop the Rock,” one I remember hearing at Chicago Wolves games when I was about the same age I was first acquainted with Harold and the Purple Crayon.

There was no logic in transporting this story to the real world. Making Harold a full-grown adult doomed the story from harboring even the slightest relevance akin to its source material. Only Reynolds, who gives a feral performance, entertains with her rodent-like behavior. However, the script subjugates her to a worthless subplot that depressingly excludes her from Harold and Moose’s escapades.

Even as time marched on, and my doubts of a feature-length adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon ever coming to fruition grew, I thought maybe DreamWorks’ Captain Underpants movie would serve as the blueprint. It was a beloved children’s property making its belated debut on the big screen. DreamWorks wisely budgeted it at an unconventionally low figure by animated movie standards ($38 million). The result was an all-around success in both the financial and quality sense.

Sometime this week or next, executives and investors at Sony Pictures and Columbia will regroup and marvel at the fact that their $40 million investment, which harbored so little connection to its source material outside of name and brand recognition, yielded an embarrassing opening weekend figure. May each one of them have to sell off one of their vacation houses in hopes they learn even something resembling a lesson fit for a Crockett Johnson book.

Starring: Zachary Levi, Lil Rel Howery, Tanya Reynolds, Jemaine Clement, Zooey Deschanel, and Benjamin Bottani. Narrated by: Alfred Molina. Directed by: Carlos Saldanha.