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Warning: This review contains spoilers for Harold and the Purple Crayon
When the trailer for Harold and the Purple Crayon released last year, my only thought was “who asked for this?” I couldn’t imagine a group of Harold Heads standing outside of Sony’s studio begging for an adaptation of a middle of the road classic children's book. However, the film was made and released to theaters Aug. 2, 2024 to a very confused audience. The film was projected to make one purpbillion dollars, but instead only made $32 million on a budget of $40 million. Was the film always destined to fail? Yes. Let’s get into why.
Live Actions Lead Little Creativity
The biggest flaw with the movie is the basic point of it being in live action. For a film based on a book about a magic crayon that can draw anything, putting the film into live action heavily limits the possibilities of what the crayon can make. This is shown within the film itself. The movie opens up with a shockingly good animated segment recounting the classic children's book and shows how much more elaborate Harold's (Zachary Levi) world has become as he has gotten older. This opening scene contains some very high quality and creative animation. Everything is made with purples and whites and finds a way to add depth to something that could have been very simple. There’s a part of Harold and his two animal friends Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds) falling from the sky where Harold is able to quickly draw up some wingsuits for them to use. It’s quick, snappy, and creative. Later in the movie, the characters are falling from the sky after ejecting from an airplane, but in live action—with budgets and realism to consider—Harold is only able to draw up a single parachute for all three of them to use. The movie being live action causes many moments of creativity to not be possible. Many of the items drawn in this movie are simple planes or cars or mundane objects. The most creative things are the animal mashups Mel (Benjamin Bottani), the boy Harold befriends in the real world, creates.
The movie being in live action causes the animal sidekicks to also become human. While I understand why this change must be made for plot reasons, in universe this is never explained. There is no explanation given as to why Moose and Porcupine are turned into humans. What makes it even more confusing is that Moose has the ability to turn back into a real moose when under enough stress. This only happens three times in the whole film though, with two of the times being unrelated to the plot. Porcupine doesn’t have this ability, or at least we never see it, just Moose. The movie has an overall flaw of it being live action which causes most other parts of the movie to be limited in potential
A Pitiful Pandering Plot
Harold and the Purple Crayon has a very generic plot. After the narrator, his creator, stops talking to him, Harold creates a door to the real world to find him. Moose joins him and Porcupine gets left behind and has to find where they are. Harold and Moose run into Terri (Zooey Deschanel) and Mel—a single mom and her son—after she crashes into their bike. After giving them a place to sleep for the night, Harold shares the crayon with Mel and the three set off to find “the old man”. High jinks ensue until they meet up with Gary the librarian (Jemaine Clement), the movie’s villain, who is the only one to figure out that Harold and his magic crayon is the same as the childrens book, to find out who Harold’s creator is. They set off to find the creator, more high jinks ensue and they get to the creator's house to discover he has passed away. This causes the third act breakup where Harold stops believing in his creativity, Moose and Porcupine disappear as they are products of his creativity, and all the characters go their separate ways. This doesn’t last long as shortly after the big climax of the film happens with Gary using the crayon to become the fantasy character he created and rule the world. After Mel helps Harold break out of the jail Gary put him in, Harold’s creativity comes back and Moose and Porcupine are revived. After the battle—that would be very cool if animated, but is slow and stilted in live action—Gary is stopped but given the opportunity to live in his creation, which he does. The movie ends with the gang going back to the book world, with a door in the creator's house to go back and forth through.
The movie has a very generic plot structure. A structure very similar to another movie about a childrens property released around a similar time: Barbie. Both of these movies are about characters made for children growing disillusioned with their world, coming to our world to seek out their creators where they befriend a single mother and their child. They both feature characters treating our world like theirs and seeing the consequences, an arrest and prison break scene, a car chase with pop music, and them meeting their creators to figure out their purpose. However, whereas Barbie uses this plot structure to tell a beautiful story about female empowerment, sexism,p and human relationships, Harold uses this structure to mess around and show off CGI crayon creations. The movie has terrible plot pacing. The movie moves at a breakneck speed at the start, moving from plot point to plot point in the span of minutes. However once the quest to find the old man starts, the movie slows to a crawl. Scenes go on forever and have so much unneeded content to fill out the runtime. Many scenes in the movie serve no purpose other than to pad out the movie. The movie can’t decide if it wants to be a fast buddy road trip movie or a slower, character driven story. The film goes for both and fails at both. The movie has an overall poor plot with poor pacing.
Awful Acting with Hideous Humor
Harold and the Purple Crayon does not have a great plot, shockingly, and the acting isn't much better. Many actors are doing the best with what they are given. Jemaine Clement does a fantastic job, elevating his character to make him one of the most entertaining to watch. The line delivery is very good and was the only source of laughs this movie got from me. Zooey Deschanel, Tanya Reynolds, and Lil Rel Howery did pretty well for the scripts they were given, however you can smell the stink of doing this for a paycheck coming off from all of them. However the film lives or dies off the performance of Harold, Zachary Levi. This is one of Levi’s worst film roles. I find Levi to be a bad person with bad views personally, but worst of all he is not a good actor. His performance as Harold feels very phoned in. Every moment he delivers in the same way; when he is happy, when he is sad, when he is upset, all emotions are the exact same. The Fortnite Friday's guest is an unconvincing Harold as he only ever plays one emotion: blind ignorance.
The film's comedy is even worse. It’s not that the movie attempts jokes and fails, it’s more like the film is missing jokes. Many times a scream from Moose is the substitution for a joke. Very few jokes land, many because of the delivery of them. The movie commits one of the biggest crimes a comedy movie could make: it’s boring. Towards the end, I was sitting there checking the time to see how much was left because I was just dreading watching the movie for much longer. For a film marketing itself around unlimited creative possibilities, it truly limited itself and created a boring product I couldn’t see children enjoying.
A Movie for No One
Harold and the Purple Crayon is one of the most nothing films I’ve ever seen. It’s not funny bad like I expected it to be, but it’s also not anywhere near good. It’s a film made for a cheap buck that didn’t even make. For as silly of a movie around Harold and the Purple Crayon sounds, there was genuine potential here shown by the animated segments. The most interesting part of this movie was the realization that it is a carbon copy of another, much better movie. It is a film that was made for no one, and ruined my life because I thought it was going to be a high budget disaster, not a boring CGI snooze.
Sources: IMDb, SonyPictures, BoxOfficeMojo, Deadline, IMDb, IMDb, IMDb, IMDb, IMDb, IMDb, IMDb, YouTube
Contact Mason Mundy with comments at mason.mundy@bsu.edu or on Instagram @masonmundy1029.
