JC Reviews: Harold and the Purple Crayon is Creatively Uncreative
by James Coulter
Confession time: I never read Harold and the Purple Crayon. However, from what I can glean from it, the story is a classic tale of a young boy with a big imagination and a small purple crayon that can bring his big ideas to life.
With this classic children’s storybook selling nearly 10,000 copies since its publication in 1955, adaptations for the big and small screen seemed inevitable. Most notably, an animated children’s series was created for HBO Family in the early 2000s.
A proper big-screen adaptation had been in production hell since the 1990s. Sony Pictures had originally planned on adapting the story into an animated film in the 2010s. However, that movie was inevitably shelved.
Now, nearly a decade later, Sony has finally released a live-action film starring Zachary Levi. But was this theatrical adaptation of a beloved children’s storybook worth the wait? Or should we have waited for a better movie? (Spoiler: it’s the latter!)
Harold and the Purple Crayon, as the title suggests, is about a young boy named Harold who has a purple crayon that can bring any drawing to life. With it, he creates his friends, Moose and Porcupine, along with an entire world of pure purple imagination, with his life story narrated by someone affectionately known as the “old man.”
Years pass, the young boy grows up into a man, and the “old man” narrating his story eventually stops. Curious as to why, Harold and his friends venture into the real world to find his “old man.” Hijinks ensue! Will his hijinks lead Harold to his old man? Or will it lead him into a world of trouble?
Again, I never read the original story. However, from what I can tell, it’s a beloved children’s storybook about the boundless potential of imagination and creativity. Sadly, its film adaptation lacks both.
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: a man grows up living a magical yet sheltered lifestyle. He ventures into the real world. His childlike innocence and naivety make him both awe-struck by this “new world” yet also incapable of navigating its many complexities. He fools around in a department store. He falls in love with a woman. And he helps a young boy overcome his bullies.
If this plot synopsis reminds you of 2003’s Elf, congrats on having watched a much better movie than this one. By all means, just watch Elf and you’ll have a much better time than watching Harold and the Purple Crayon.
Again, for a film based on a children’s story about creativity, this movie evidently lacks it. This is a story about a boy with a crayon who can draw anything. It could have been a ground-breaking movie about the limitless power of imagination and what it’s capable of (something akin to The Lego Movie). Instead, what we got was a movie that rehashes tired tropes and plots from better movies.
Even Zachary Levi’s casting as the titular adult Harold seems to lean heavily on his previous performance as Shazam. As one review on The Movie Cricket wrote: “Levi relies on the same shtick he used in two Shazam movies, playing the clueless man-child with incredible powers, but the routine is getting old.”
Actually, having brought up Elf earlier, that’s another bugbear for me. The problem isn’t even that this movie is about a grown man with the mind of a child. Both Elf and 1988’s Big used that concept. The problem is, both of those movies used that concept well.
Both Elf and Big used the adult man’s childlike innocence to help bring life to a boring adult world. Buddy helped revitalize the Christmas spirit for people who had lost it. Josh helped bring child-like wonder to a toy industry that had lost it.
Ideally, Harold should have been a movie about a man whose boundless creativity and imagination bring life to a boring, modern world that had all but lost it. And the film certainly thinks it’s about that. It does the bare minimum by helping a boy defeat his bullies and his mother drop her dead-end job to fulfill her lost dream of playing piano. But overall, the movie fails to live up to either its promise or its premise.
Honestly, this movie was cringe and bad enough and would have easily been a middling two stars. However, what ruined the movie for me was one thing: the villain.
Apparently, the ideal antagonist for a movie based on a story about imagination and creativity is the author of a fantasy story. Oh, but it’s okay because he’s a “failed author” whose work is highly derivative of Tolkien and other fantasy stories. Oh, and he’s a librarian, too! (Again, an ideal villain for this movie based on a book.)
So, yeah, as both a writer and a self-published fantasy author, the movie’s villain being a failed fantasy author whose story gets constantly rejected by publishers…that rubbed me the wrong way. And made me give this a failing one star.
In short, don’t watch Harold and the Purple Crayon. Read the book it’s based on. And if you want to watch a movie about a man-child navigating the real world, watch Elf or Big instead.
