Harold and the Purple Crayon

by Mike McGranaghan

Harold and the Purple Crayon is the dumbest, most soulless family film to come out of Hollywood since Clifford the Big Red Dog. It is an offense to the young viewers at which it’s aimed. It is an offense to their parents. Heck, it’s even an offense to the screens it’s projected onto. I have a child right in the movie’s target demographic. He did not accompany me. If he had, I would have apologized profusely afterward.

Rather than telling a simple story based on Crockett Johnson’s beloved children’s book, the film turns itself into a big special effects-laden adventure. Zachary Levi plays the adult Harold. In an effort to find the man responsible for creating him, he draws a door into the real world, then goes through with friends Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds). He ends up worming his way into the lives of widow Terry (Zooey Deschanel) and her son Mel (Benjamin Bottani), the latter of whom is dazzled by Harold’s ability to make objects real just by drawing them with his magic crayon. There’s also a requisite villain, in this case a bitter librarian named Gary (Jemaine Clement) with a crush on Terry.

Incidentally, Terry works at an Ollie’s Bargain Outlet. We know that because she constantly talks about working at Ollie's. And we see her wearing her Ollie’s outfit. And several scenes take place inside an Ollie’s store. Harold and the Purple Crayon really, really wants your kids to shop at Ollie’s. The shameless product placement is insulting.

Johnson’s book is a celebration of imagination. The movie adaptation goes directly against that intent, showing no imagination whatsoever. We start with a predictable, hackneyed story that offers no surprises or substance and focuses way too much on Gary’s quest for revenge. Added to that are a whole bunch of dull scenes in which Harold creates havoc with his drawings. That includes a sequence where he puts a real propeller on a coin operated helicopter ride, causing the child inside to take flight. (The visual effects are cruddy throughout, incidentally.) Topping it off are predictable “rude humor” jokes designed to get a PG rating and needless pop culture references. Yeah, the kids are totally going to howl at that nod to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Zachary Levi gives an annoyingly chipper performance. Imagine his turn in Shazam! cranked up several notches. His work is one note repeated endlessly, to the point where we want to see Harold draw a grand piano to fall from the sky and land on top of him. Tanya Reynolds gives Levi a run for his money in the annoying department. She’s trying to do some sort of physical comedy in which she acts like a human porcupine. It looks ridiculous – and not in a funny way. Only Jemaine Clement generates anything approaching a laugh, but even he’s hampered by the lazy screenplay.

Harold and the Purple Crayon runs only 80 minutes without end credits, yet it feels three times that length because of how uninspired it is. You can tell that the filmmakers are merely trading on the name of a well-known book. No effort was made to replicate the simple charm that turned that book into a classic of children’s literature. The movie is an example of IP-based cinema at its worst.

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