Purple Pain, Purple Pain

This adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon might be worse than you imagined. Photo: Sony Pictures/Everett Collection

Harold and the Purple Crayon, an adaptation of the beloved 1955 children’s book written and illustrated by Crockett Johnson, begins the way you might expect: with animation rendered in the style of Johnson’s minimalist artwork that depicts a little boy who can draw things into existence. After handcrafting a boat ride, a feast of pies, and two new friends (a moose and a porcupine), the young and inexplicably bald Harold sketches his own bedroom window and beams himself home, just as he does in the beloved book.

“The end,� says an unidentified narrator as the sequence concludes. “Good night, folks.�

For the briefest, most precious of milliseconds, it seems like the 2024 version of this familiar bedtime story actually might end right there, after it’s covered pretty much all of the original source material in a few minutes. But then the narrator says he’s joking, because obviously there’s a lot more story to tell about Harold and his fixation on drawing magical Crayola graffiti — one pointless hour and 25 minutes’ worth, in fact.

The idea to make Harold and the Purple Crayon into a full-length film has been in the air for decades. Since the 1990s, various versions have gone through development and failed to make it to the finish line, including one that was supposed to be directed by Spike Jonze. It’s shocking that after all that effort, this iteration, written by David Guion and Michael Handelman and directed by Carlos Saldanha, who worked on the Ice Age and Rio movies, is the best Hollywood could do.

Harold and the Purple Crayon, a story most of us remember hearing as children or reading to our own kids, has been stretched out into a feature-length comedy-adventure that’s supposed to serve as a testament to the power of imagination, despite having little imagination of its own. If you told me ChatGPT somehow made this entire movie, I wouldn’t believe you, but only because I think ChatGPT might have done a more coherent job.

After that initial recap of the book, the movie introduces a grown-up version of Harold (Zachary Levi), who starts wondering aloud who drew him into being. The narrator — dubbed the Old Man — says that he did. But when Harold tries to ask follow-up questions, the Old Man goes quiet, and so our naïve protagonist draws an entrance to a place called the Real World and flings himself there in the hopes of finding the artist that traced him to life.

Once Harold walks through that Real World door, followed soon after by Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds of Sex Education and The Decameron), the comedy-adventure switches from animation to live action and loses any sense of wonder it may have momentarily generated. It also doesn’t make a ton of sense?

Harold, now a fully grown man dashing through contemporary society in a blue onesie, is still able to use his purple crayon to sketch fully functioning airplanes and bicycles out of thin air because, you know: magic. I accept that. What I cannot accept is that both Moose and Porcupine show up in reality — specifically, the town of Providence, Rhode Island — as human beings. Moose is just Lil Rel Howery in a cardigan sweater with a moose on it, while Porcupine manifests as Reynolds dressed like a punk rocker with spiked, purple hair that runs down the middle of her head.

Why do they change from animals into humans? The movie never explains, perhaps because the real answer — that presumably Sony didn’t want to pay for the CGI required to bring crayon drawings to life and keep more legit-looking animals in the movie — would distract from the film’s message. As Harold articulates it, “with a little imagination, you can be whatever you want to be.� Except, apparently, for an actual moose or an actual porcupine. You need a little imagination and a more robust postproduction budget for that.

Like other misguided, feature-length adaptations of children’s stories — see just about every film based on a Dr. Seuss book — Harold and the Purple Crayon keeps adding more uninspired narrative colors to a work that was much more fascinating when it was closer to monochrome. Harold befriends a preteen named Mel (Benjamin Bottani) who recently lost his father, as well as Mel’s skeptical mom, Terri (Zooey Deschanel, trying and failing to seem engaged in this endeavor), who aid his efforts to track down the Old Man. So does Gary (Jemaine Clement), a local librarian whose real ambition is to write sexually tinged fantasy novels and sees Harold’s crayon as a way to finally realize his freaky dreams.

Harold and the Purple Crayon spends a lot of its time trying to coast off the familiar charms of a fish-out-of-water story. When he isn’t looking around with mouth-agape awe at the wonders of modern society — e.g., the massive amount of inventory at his local Ollie’s — Levi’s Harold is smiling and scrunching up his nose so we can see how much of a cutie pie he is. Levi plays the character as if he’s deliberately trying to deliver a less nuanced version of Tom Hanks’s performance in Big, right down to a montage in which Terri plays “Chopsticks� on a crayon-generated purple piano while elsewhere, Harold nibbles away on an itty-bitty piece of baby corn.

But paying homage to Big doesn’t make your movie as good as Big. Harold and the Purple Crayon makes the classic Hollywood mistake of taking a story that was lovely because of its concision and simplicity and turns it into a movie that is overly long and complicated for no good reason. By the end, I had no interest in having access to a magic crayon. What I really wanted was a magic eraser, one that could wipe away this silly, aggressively unnecessary film.