As someone who venerates Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson’s 1955 hymn to the power of imagination (I gift every love one’s new baby with a copy of the book with a purple crayon taped inside), the idea of a film adaptation has always filled me with a certain sense of trepidation. This is due to the somewhat uneven track record of past attempts to bring the great works of children’s literature to the screen. Sure, a film like Spike Jonze’s take on Maurice Sendak’s beloved “Where the Wild Things Are” captured the delicate charms of its source material in ways that enchanted viewers both young and old. But for every one of those, there’s something like that monstrous live-action version of “The Cat in the Hat,” a movie just as bad as the original Dr. Seuss book was good.
Now “Harold and the Purple Crayon” has arrived in theaters in all its live-action glory. It starts on a surprisingly engaging note: a 2-D animated sequence that recaps Harold’s adventures in the book. The sequence finds a decent approximation of the book’s famous visual style and features narration by Alfred Molina. Unfortunately, that sequence lasts about 90-odd seconds, and the real story kicks in after that. Everything goes straight to ultra-garish Hell via a narrative that feels more like a failed “Jumanji” knockoff than anything that the late Johnson’s work could have possibly inspired. Here is a film that pays lip service to the importance of creativity without ever displaying a demonstrable shred of it during its seemingly interminable run time.
After that recap of the original story, we see a now-grown Harold (Zachary Levi) still cavorting through his cartoon world along with friends Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds) and the ever-present voice of the narrator. Then, one day, the narrator’s voice disappears, and Harold decides to use his all-powerful crayon to draw a portal to our world so that the three of them can try to track him down. Alas, the real world proves to be odd and confusing for them, so luckily, Harold and Moose (now in human form, though he occasionally switches back for no apparent reason) end up running into Terri (Zooey Deschanel) and Melvin (Benjamin Bottani), a mother and middle school-aged son who are still in the dumps since the death of Mel’s dad. For reasons that defy explanation, she allows them to stay the night at her house, where Harold finds Mel to be a kindred spirit — he has an unseen imaginary pet that is equal parts eagle, lion, and alligator — and lets him in on the magical crayon. (Porcupine, for the record, has gotten separated from the others and is off wreaking benign havoc on her own.)
While Terri is off at her job at Ollie’s — an institution shown far more reverence here than Johnson’s book — Mel ends up helping Harold and Moose to find the narrator, leading to any number of wacky slapstick scenes in which they fly through the air in a plane or cause mayhem at the store. They also enlist the aid of Gary (Jermaine Clement), a creepy librarian with the hots for Terri, who is also the author of an unpublishable fantasy novel called “The Glaive of Gagaroh” (allowing the film also to alienate fans of “Krull” to boot). Eventually, Gary reveals to Harold that he is, in fact, a character from a book, which sends Harold, Moose, and Mel off on a trip to Crockett Johnson’s house to finally see him. Although Google helpfully reveals the address, it inexplicably fails to mention the key reason why they could have skipped that trip. Meanwhile, Gary, having seen the crayon’s power first-hand, schemes to acquire it for himself and bring the universe of his book to life.
