By itself, the opening 10-minute salvo of Harold and the Purple Crayon — Carlos Saldanha’s live-action feature debut — is a thing of rare beauty, a near-perfect stand-alone preface that effortlessly summarizes Crockett Johnson’s 1955 picture book. Neatly capturing the quirky simplicity of the original illustrations but adding a kinetic energy worthy of the postwar boogie-doodles of animator Norman McLaren, it’s a thoughtful overture to a refreshingly straightforward family film, one that runs with the concept of Johnson’s story but doesn’t try to fluff it up with excess sentiment or any similarly distracting romantic subplots.
When we meet him, Harold is a cartoon boy with a purple crayon who can draw anything he wants, including his two best friends: Moose (a moose) and Porcupine (a porcupine). Together, they live in a 2D world that grows bigger as Harold becomes an adult. Finally, Harold becomes fascinated by the concept of his creation, which causes him to engage with The Narrator (voiced by Alfred Molina), who lives in The Real World, where things are “a bit more colorful and a lot more complicated.” Harold would love to meet his maker (“Why did you draw me?” he wonders), but suddenly The Narrator goes quiet.
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To find him, Harold draws a door marked The Real World and walks through it, followed in short order by Moose and Porcupine. In The Real World, Harold is now played by Shazam! star Zachary Levi, while Moose and Porcupine take human form — Lil Rel Howery and Tanya Reynolds, respectively. As they tumble into the bushes of a busy municipal park, the inevitable fish-out-of-water story starts immediately; Harold is clearly a man in a blue onesie and the locals are hostile (“Get lost, Smurf!”). Porcupine follows behind a little later, and to be honest, whenever she’s not onscreen, we don’t really miss her.
The story, as such, kicks in when Harold and Moose, a likeable double act, set off to find The Narrator, aka The Old Man, on a tandem whipped up by Harold’s magic crayon. They swiftly encounter widowed single mother Terri (Zooey Deschanel), who accidentally knocks them off their bike while driving — on the phone — with her young son Mel (Benjamin Bottani), a bright kid with an imaginary lizard-like friend called Carl. Fearing a lawsuit, Terri allows Harold and Moose to stay in the spare room above her garage for the night.
The next day, Harold and Moose set off to find The Old Man, and Mel tags along for the ride. The first stop is the library, where they encounter librarian Gary (Jemaine Clement), a would-be fantasy writer whose 700-page epic The Glaive of G’Gaur’u (or something like that; a running gag is that no one can ever get the title right) is set in a world that he describes as “Hogwarts, Middle Earth and Narnia combined.” Being a librarian, Gary is quick to cotton on to Harold’s literary origins and hatches a plan to relieve him of his magic crayon.
The casting of Deschanel is a big tipoff as to where this is heading, since there’s a lot of Elf in the comedy of misunderstanding that ensues. Terri stacks shelves at a place called Ollies, a store that “sells everything” (“Sounds like the best job ever!” says the guileless Harold). Terri even has a musical backstory, as a classical concert pianist who was forced to give up the art when her husband died. Rather than just rerun Elf’s greatest hits, however, Saldanha’s film throws something more soulful into the mix, recalling more adult elements of films like The Truman Show — or even The Jerk — when Harold discovers what’s happened to The Old Man and experiences an existential crisis (“I was wrong about everything. I’m just a dumb drawing drawing other dumb drawings.”)
Thankfully this loss of innocence doesn’t last too long and won’t be too traumatic for younger kids, especially when “Library Gary” gets hold of the purple crayon and makes plans for world domination. Despite the medieval fire and brimstone that follows, Flight of the Conchords star Clement ensures the peril stays at kid-friendly levels of pantomime villainy. Adults, meanwhile, will certainly relish the deadpan bathos of this bargain-basement Tolkien, who writes for “ages 14 and up” and in the climactic battle with Harold (literally a quick-on-the draw Western showdown) uses his crayon to make — of all things — a trebuchet.
Like a PG-rated Simon Rex, star Levi is warm screen presence that kids of all ages will be drawn to, and his charisma carries the film through scenes of increasingly haphazard slapstick to a low-key but emotionally satisfying finish. For now, it’s hard to see how this can become a franchise, but if the film tells us nothing else, Harold, with his purple crayon or not, can be surprisingly resourceful.
Title: Harold and the Purple Crayon
Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: August 2, 2024
Director: Carlos Saldanha
Screenwriters: David Guion and Michael Handelman (based on the book by Crockett Johnson)
Cast: Zachary Levi, Zooey Deschanel, Benjamin Bottani, Lil Rel Howery, Tanya Reynolds, Jemaine Clement
Rating: PG
Running time: 1 hr 32 min