‘Harold And The Purple Crayon’ Review – Movies Might Have Been A Mistake

My partner is a nurse. Although she scoffs each morning when I bid her adieu with a cheerful “Go save some lives!” as she heads to the hospital, that’s exactly what she does. Her typical day includes working with half a dozen patients who are all dealing with a litany of medical concerns, giving them top-notch care and delivering it all with a smile. She arranges their discharge paperwork, administers IV fluids and medications, and coordinates a continued care plan with their respective physicians in an effort to keep them healthy. When she came home on Tuesday, she refused to hug me until she showered, as she spent her day cleaning up blood and… well, other stuff. One of her patients coded; another wouldn’t stop telling her that she was a witch trying to poison her. (It was Tylenol.) As Zachary Levi’s favorite News Nation commentator might say, nursing is “a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.”

Me? I spent my Tuesday in a screening room doing the two things I love the most in this world: watching movies and writing about them. I’m quite lucky to call this my job. Somehow, she had a better shift.

When the task of the workday is the baffling and ill-conceived Harold and the Purple Crayon, that’s the only statement that feels remotely fair. It’s the kind of film – if you can call whatever this slop is by that name – that makes a critic wonder, “Where did I go wrong?” One of my best friends works at Jane Street. Another is a coding wiz who works for a rapidly-rising startup. My mother is a teacher; my father, a FedEx courier. (Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I did not travel the other, if you will.) Perhaps I should have followed my cousin into the world of graphic design; although she has never worked on a movie, I’m certain that her handiwork would have done this misbegotten work of mishegoss disguised as a pseudo-adaptation of a beloved children’s book some dire favors. It’s irredeemable, ugly, and a 90-minute headache that seems as though it will go on forever. In fact, the most positive thing I can think to say about it is that it just crosses that 90-minute mark, so the suffering ends in a reasonable amount of time. Yet even those who identify as dare-devilish gluttons for punishment should proceed with caution.

Not convinced yet? Come, let us show you to your wing in the ward. Chances are you’ve read Crockett Johnson’s “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” a 64-page picture book from 1955 that follows a four-year-old boy and his imagination as he adventures through the night armed with his trusty, magical purple crayon. Harold has the ability to bring whatever he draws to life, just by etching it into thin air. He starts by drawing the moon, as he wants to take a moonlit walk, yet sees no light in the night sky. He draws himself a path to walk along; he encounters a dragon, which he drew; he has a picnic, which he drew, and eats nine different kinds of pie, all of which he drew. By the story’s end, he can’t find his room, so he illustrates a whole city, searching aimlessly for his own window. When he finally recalls where his home would be positioned in the city’s skyline, he draws it, and heads back to bed. Six spin-off books were released between 1956 and 1963, and three more came after Johnson’s death in 1975. The end.

Until 1992, when the battle for Harold’s adaptation rights began, a journey that is somehow twistier than anything that little chap could conjure. In 1994, Michael Tolkin (The Player) was tapped as Harold’s scribe, with Henry Selick set to direct the film for Wild Things Productions. But Selick chose to instead develop James and the Giant Peach for Disney, resulting in his and Tolkin’s respective exits. Later came Spike Jonze’s turn. His vision would have fused animation and live-action – similar to the version that releases Friday – but he exited the project after more than a year of work when new management at TriStar Pictures intervened just two months before filming was set to commence. (Thank goodness, too, as David O. Russell was brought in to perform some rewrites on Jonze’s script.) 

Then, in 2010, news broke that Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Animation, Steven Spielberg, and Will Smith were getting in on the purple crayon’s magic and developing an animated film that would be written by Josh Klausner (Shrek the Third). In 2016, the writer was suddenly author and illustrator Dallas Clayton. The film was then canceled, only to be revived yet again in 2021 by Davis Entertainment, who brought in Carlos Saldanha (Rio, Ferdinand) to direct, David Guion and Michael Handelman (Dinner for Schmucks, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb) to co-write the script, and Zachary Levi to star. This is what those in the biz would call “development hell.” If only Harold and co. had remained there. 

Instead, he’s made his way not just off the page and onto the big screen, but into the real world, now looking a whole lot svelter and older than an adventurous toddler. Though the first five minutes of Harold and the Purple Crayon seem to have been hand-drawn, the imaginative animating abilities that fall directly in Saldanha’s wheelhouse are soon tossed aside in favor of live-action I.P. extension that no one asked for. (It certainly doesn’t help that, while well-animated, the contents of this prologue spell out exactly how the film plans to reject the book and tell its own story.) When Harold (Levi) draws a door to the real world, he and his pals Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds) walk through and suddenly find themselves three-dimensional. Their goal is to search for the “Old Man,” aka the book’s narrator (voiced by Alfred Molina) who served as a father figure for Harold, yet has recently disappeared. This turn essentially sets up the film’s basic framework, as a story about a man-boy and his animal buds in search of their North Star. Not too far-fetched, if a bit simplistic.

Have no fear, though, for Saldanha, Guion, and Handelman have plenty of other tricks up their sleeve, nevermind the fact that you can see the rainbow handkerchiefs bunched up all along their forearms. In the early stages of their search for their Old Man, Harold and Moose run into a single mom (Zooey Deschanel, seemingly being held against her will) and her son, Mel (Benjamin Bottani). Implausibly, Deschanel offers them a place to stay, allowing Harold to showcase the wondrous power of a child’s imagination to the fatherless Mel. The boy joins these strange, homeless men in their quest for paternal guidance, leading them to the film’s villain – there’s always one – Gary the librarian (Jemaine Clement of What We Do in the Shadows fame). Gary has written a fantasy novel that he believes is “bigger than Hogwarts, Middle Earth, and Narnia… combined!” Needless to say, his discovery of what Harold’s crayon can create leads to chaotic hijinks more akin to a film by Jan de Bont than by the guy who made Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Thankfully, Clement seems to know how ridiculous his task here is, and hams it up as a man who wishes he could boast silly armor and stringy gray locks, like a knight in desperate need of a Hims subscription. The rest of the cast – even the often funny Howery and the up-and-coming Reynolds – has little to do; this is Levi’s movie, no scribbles about it, the continuation of a bizarre trend that sees C, D, and F movies clamoring aimlessly to turn Levi into Hollywood’s next go-to guy for the parts that Ryan Reynolds and John Krasinski turned down. For a while, it seemed like it might just happen, as he was never not the star of whatever film he appeared in, save for cameos in the middle two Thor movies; He’s tall, handsome, and appears likable until you ask him about Pfizer. I once saw him at a mussels restaurant in the West Village, and though it was evident that he 1) was either on a date or out with an important member of his team, given the serious nature of their conversation over sparkling water and free bread, and 2) didn’t want to be bothered by ogling normies, he was kind to the few folks who had the gall to interrupt his dinner to ask, “What are you famous for? I’ve seen you somewhere!” 

The issue with this strategy, however, is that Levi knows no other way to play a part than with grating boyish charm and a confused expression the host of Blue’s Clues might make while he waits for those at home to answer his riddle. It’s as if he’s been possessed by his Shazam! character for good, walking planet Earth with a dopey smile he thinks will be enough to convince the cashier that he’s old enough to buy beer. For a guy who once slammed Tinseltown for how much “garbage” it seems hell-bent on forcing upon audiences, he’s starred in quite a few of their most recent failures, both critically and financially. It won’t be a surprise when Harold and the Purple Crayon flops, seeing that Levi hasn’t bothered to promote the film on X/Twitter since its trailer dropped in late May; since then, his attention has been dedicated to supporting an equally buoyant cause. (I’ll let you do your own research there, something Levi could appreciate.)

In reality, though, what should doom Harold is not Levi’s politics nor sidelined parts for the superior actors that surround him, but a dull, soulless reimagination of a book that is entirely about the power of imagination. Crockett Johnson believed it could take you places you’d never dreamt of going, that your best friends could be born from it, and that you could grow as a person because of it. The problems with Harold are many, but principally, it fails to inspire any such belief in its audience, despite its insistence on trying to speak it into existence. During the film’s final showdown, when Levi’s Harold announces “I believe in me. And I believe in my friends,”, it elicits a response from the eyes, but it’s a roll, not a tear. Later, when he says, “Life isn’t just something that happens to you. It’s something you make,” your best efforts to agree are bound to be trumped by hopes that someone had come along and made a better movie. Or, better yet, a crayon with an eraser.

Harold and the Purple Crayon is currently playing in theaters courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment.