Harold and the Purple Crayon (2024, dir. Carlos Saldanha)

by Jack Martin | Jul 31, 2024

Certificate: PG

Running Time: 90 mins

UK Distributor: Sony Pictures

UK Release Date: 31 July 2024

WHO’S IN HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON?

Zachary Levi, Lil Rel Howery, Benjamin Bottani, Zooey Deschanel, Jemaine Clement, Tanya Reynolds, Alfred Molina, Ravi Patel, Camille Guaty, Pete Gardner, Seth Robbins

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Carlos Saldanha (director), David Guion and Michael Handelman (writers), John Davis (producer), Batu Sener (composer), Gabriel Beristain (cinematographer), Mark Helfrich and Tia Nolan (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

Harold (Levi) causes chaos in the real world with his magical crayon…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON?

Originally published in 1955, Crockett Johnson’s 64-page children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon sees the titular Harold – a four-year-old boy with no hair in an all-blue onesie – go around drawing a bunch of stuff with his magical life-creating crayon before dozing off to sleep… and that’s it. Short and simple, in and out, nothing at all complicated.

As you can imagine, it’s also not the strongest of source material for a film adaptation. How exactly does one craft a 90-minute movie out of something with barely even a plot, let alone one without any sense of conflict or development? Judging by their own attempt, it’s possible that not even director Carlos Saldanha nor screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman know how to bring Harold and the Purple Crayon to a life of its own, because they infuse it with a whole bunch of tiresome family movie tropes rather than actually explore the central concept to its fullest potential – which is saying something, because it’s already a fairly light concept to begin with.

The film serves as a sequel to Johnson’s original novella, with Harold (Zachary Levi) now a full-grown adult but still bearing the boundless optimism and imagination of the child he once was, living in his 2D-animated world of make-believe with his anthropomorphic friends Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds), with occasional appearances by an unknown narrator known as “the Old Man” (Alfred Molina). One day, Harold is puzzled as to why the Old Man has suddenly disappeared, so with his magic purple crayon he sets foot into the real world to find him, with Moose and Porcupine – the latter two inexplicably turning human, presumably to save on CG effects – following close behind.

From there, Harold and the Purple Crayon indulges in just about every conceivable family movie convention that you can think of, specifically ones where magical beings like Harold and his friends venture into the far less whimsical real world. From the naïve man-child of a main character taking regular sayings and mannerisms literally, to them befriending the child of an overworked parent – played, in this case, by Zooey Deschanel – who has lost their own imagination in some way, to a villain (who here is Jemaine Clement’s librarian and would-be fantasy author) who seeks to claim something precious to the hero for their own purposes, there’s no trope left unused by these filmmakers. It’s almost like if Barbie was given endless studio notes to appeal much more to younger audiences than anyone else, but unlike Barbie, this film doesn’t really have the intelligence to be anything other than typical family-friendly fare that you have undoubtedly seen time and time again in stuff like The Smurfs or Sonic the Hedgehog.

It also clearly doesn’t have the budget to fully flex its imagination, as evident in how surprisingly cost-effective the whole thing looks. I was partially joking when I mentioned earlier how the Moose and Porcupine characters are human in the real world because they didn’t want to spend too much on making them CG animals, but it also wouldn’t shock me if that actually turned out to be the case, because Harold and the Purple Crayon often goes out of its way to cut corners in its effects, from trick camera angles to obvious wirework, to some painfully obvious green-screen work that does nothing to solidify the illusion. Even without the rather bad CGI littering the screen, the movie feels lazily constructed, as characters will just always know where other people are at any given moment or will suddenly show up in scenes at exactly the right time, while certain sub-plots and sequences will be resolved within minutes, all because they probably didn’t have the money to go much further with any of them.

In all, the movie isn’t very good. It’s predictable, formulaic, not very funny, and featuring performances by actors who you can tell plain as day are just there for an easy paycheque, and as such have absolutely no discerning interest in this material whatsoever. At the same time, though, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s an entirely bad film. To a point, it has some sense of heart, and a tinge of sweetness that comes from the good nature of its main characters, even Zachary Levi’s Harold which more often than not feels like a redux of his Shazam! boy-in-a-man’s-body schtick.

He and a handful of others, including Tanya Reynolds who has some very physical scenes largely to herself, at least look like they’re having fun making this movie, as is Saldanha whenever the movie is presented in its 2D-drawn format (this is the director’s live-action debut after working on several Blue Sky Studios movies like Rio and Ferdinand, and in these bookending sequences you can absolutely tell that he is first and foremost an animator). Admirably, it also resists opting for going with easy bottom-of-the-barrel juvenile gags like so many other films like this tend to do; there’s not a fart joke in sight here, nor anything considerably insufferable.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to rescue this movie from its inevitable fate. Mark my words, Harold and the Purple Crayon is going to be quickly forgotten by most audiences, and swallowed up into the same pit of recent forgettable family movies like Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Tom and Jerry: The Movie and so on, all of which can’t shake off their tired nature, no matter how much it resists easy fart jokes.

In a way, like the original book, it comes and goes through one ear and out the other, leaving little to no impact whatsoever, though this film doesn’t have the luxury of just being a handful of pages long.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Harold and the Purple Crayon is a forgettable family movie that hits just about every trope you could imagine with this type of film, in addition to noticeably cutting corners with its surprisingly cheap effects and filmmaking, but its light sense of heart does make it a tad more tolerable than other much worse examples out there.