Harold and the Purple crayon movie review: Blundering Children’s film fare

Harold and the Purple crayon movie review

Film: Harold and the Purple crayon
Cast: Zachary Levi, Lil Rel Howery, Benjamin Bottani, Jemaine Clement, Tanya Reynolds, Alfred Molina, Zooey Deschanel, Ravi Patel
Director: Carlos Saldanha
Rating: 2/5
Runtime: 90 min

This film adaptation of the children's book Harold and the Purple Crayon, written by Crockett Johnson and published in 1955 has imaginative power but fails to make it all seem magical.

Harold can make anything come to life simply by drawing it with his magical purple crayon. After he grows up he draws himself off the book's pages and into the physical world. Once he enters the real world he finds that his trusted magic drawing wand can do much more than what he imagined as a child. But then the real world is not as controlled as the literary one and Harold finds his crayon falling into the wrong hands and the chance of peril to himself and to the world he is in now, has intensified drastically. It takes all of Harold and his friends' creativity to save both the real world and his own.

The opening sequence in 2-D animation recapping Harold's adventures in the book is designed well enough to match-up to the book's visual style. The narration by Alfred Molina fits in comfortably. It's the adult story thereafter that puts everything in peril. Zachary Levy the ‘Shazam' star as the adult Harold, fails to rise up to the occasion. The lack of imagination and the tricky nature of the creativity spoils the fun.

After the introductory original story, we see a grown-up Harold (Zachary Levi) cavorting through his cartoon world along with friends Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds) and then suddenly after the voice of the narrator disappears, Harold decides to use his all-powerful crayon to draw a portal to the real world in order to track the old man down. Harold and Moose (now in human form) end up running into a still grieving widow Terri (Zooey Deschanel) and her middle-school going son Melvin (Benjamin Bottani). She allows them to stay one night at her house. Then the story takes on ‘IF' territory with Harold discovering Mel to have an unseen imaginary pet that is equal parts eagle, lion, and alligator. Porcupine, separated from the duo, is in the meanwhile wreaking a benign havoc of her own.

Trouble also comes to them when Gary (Jermaine Clement), a creepy librarian, the author of an unpublished fantasy novel called "The Glaive of Gagaroh" sees the crayon's power first-hand and schemes to acquire it for himself and bring the universe of his book to life.

The narrative is replete with slapstick moments winding in and out of bookish and real-world situations. The adult Harold as portrayed by Levy is pretty much annoying. The screenplay by David Guion and Michael Handelman fails to draw out a heroic character worthy of veneration. The editing is not exactly seamless with so many back and forth transitions that it gets a little exasperating after a point. The CGI is sloppy, there's no emotion to latch on to here and the action set-pieces fail to rise above cartoon-ish nadir. The film fails to enthuse young audiences and the adults accompanying them might well consider this cinema outing a waste of precious time. There's really nothing here to make the film exciting other than the brave but rather fool-hardy attempt to turn a difficult children's book into fantasy cinema.