Harold And The Purple Crayon

The problem with adapting books written for tiny children is that there’s typically no real plot to work with — and what there is, by definition, is meant to last about five minutes right before goodnight kisses and sleepy time. Adapting this Crockett Johnson classic from 1955 therefore involves taking all sorts of liberties, and only a handful of them pay off for director Carlos Saldanha (the Ice Age movies) and his stars.

In fact, this film races through the original book about a boy who can draw anything and make it come to life in a charming opening scene, and then goes off on its own adventure. Zachary Levi voices a grown Harold, who is still hanging out in a purple world with his friends Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds) when the voice of his narrator (Alfred Molina) goes suddenly silent. Harold resolves to find him, and draws a door to our world to do so. Cue theoretically comedic misadventures and chaos, which sadly aren’t very funny or exciting. Worse, the sort of wide-eyed charm Levi showed in the first Shazam! has been replaced by endless mugging with an edge of desperation.

Harold and his friends meet Zooey Deschanel’s single mum and her helpful son Mel (Benjamin Bottani) for some family content and get into some conflict with an underused Jemaine Clement as a librarian/would-be fantasy author, but that’s about it. And in a film that lives or dies on fantastical fish-out-of-water antics and magically animated purple things, there is never enough of either to make you believe a crayon can be enchanted, so you end up with a story as anonymous as the Rhode Island setting. Saldanha does find some nice moments in the last act to remind us about the power of imagination and creativity, but it’s never enough to make up for the lack of laughs. You’ll be wishing for a purple crayon to scribble over the lot of it.