The Soulless Harold and the Purple Crayon Feels Like It Escaped Its Streaming Service
After years of studios expanding their streaming portfolios with completely disposable Original Movies to be flipped on by parents as a substitute for a taxing night at the movie theater, audiences have been trained to notice when a film should not be shown on a big screen. You may not have articulated it, but you’d know that expanding one of those Netflix Kissing Booth movies to 45 feet tall would make the functional, sitcom-like lighting and composition feel utterly wrong. The fact that the distinction between how we tell stories on TV and the silver screen has been increasingly eroded, because of the prestige TV trend and content quotas of streaming services, is probably why Harold and the Purple Crayon feels so empty.
The charmless but otherwise inoffensive film, which adapts the 1955 picture book by Crockett Johnson, sticks a cartoon man with a magical crayon in the normal world, all while displaying a troubling reliance on the dubious mantra “we’ll fix it in post.”
Starring a fleet of actors all at different positions on the “Is this film beneath them?” scale—Zachary Levi, Zooey Deschanel, Lil Rel Howery, Jemaine Clement, Tanya Reynolds—Harold and the Purple Crayon shamelessly pilfers from better fish-out-of-water kids’ films seemingly without being aware of it. In the world of video games, scammy developers will build a cheap, crappy game out of skimmed, pre-made elements in order to bilk customers out of a few Steam payments; Harold feels like if you “asset flipped” an entire motion picture.
Just when you realize that the plot—wherein a jolly, naïve manchild unaccustomed to the human world travels to the East Coast (here, Rhode Island) to reunite with a patriarch he’s never met—is a structural carbon copy of Elf, Zooey Deschanel turns up to play a jaded, cynical human in need of magic spirit. And as Harold (Levi) uses his gift—a purple crayon that can bring to life anything it draws—in a quest to reunite with the Narrator (Alfred Molina) who has recently disappeared from Harold’s lively dreamworld, you try to work out how much of Barbie the Harold and the Purple Crayon team had seen before cameras started rolling. Every beat that Harold cribs is pulled off with sanitized, edgeless enthusiasm; it’s not bad in a way that excites ire or indignation, it’s just a cloying, lazy product, starring someone who cares more than anyone else involved.
How is Zachary Levi doing? The Chuck and Shazam! actor recently gave a vulnerable, emotional performance as Hollywood actor Zachary Levi being very upset that the DCEU was collapsing around him, realizing that if A-listers like The Rock and Henry Cavill were being cast aside like they were no more substantive than the action figures they were playing, then the “Best Actor—Action” winner at the 2010 Teen Choice Awards wouldn’t fare much better. He’s also made troubling statements about vaccines and bringing his Christian mission to the workplace.
Eyes are largely on Harold and the Purple Crayon to see how low Levi is stooping after, well, all of the above, but his performance in the film isn’t insufficient because he’s wrong for the part, but because he’s trying too hard. His performance as an animated silly man in a kids’ film, where he must pull exaggerated faces, yell a lot and play bold, broad emotions with gusto, is adequate; his eccentric face and delivery occasionally conjure a smirk or chuckle. But even though he’s suited to these types of simple roles, Levi does a disservice to his instincts by overstressing every comedic and dramatic beat a hair too much. It leaves us with a central performance that is about 75% on the money, but leaves a lingering sense of being forced.
The true fatal flaw of Harold and the Purple Crayon is that everything—from the story to the visual design—feels like it came pre-packaged in a microwave dinner. The plain, touristy aesthetic shot by DP Gabriel Beristain makes Rhode Island look as marketable as possible, the pop songs that appear in every bad children’s film are particularly egregious and the effects look like they’re trying to sell toothpaste. It’s not just that the film looks as cheap or lifeless as a commercial (it does!) but that every performance, camera move and edit feels designed around the impulse to promote something in a fun, peppy, but dramatically ungrounded way.
Harold and the Purple Crayon moves like it wants to show all the ways that a product can be fun, exciting and nourishing in a bite-sized format, but—because there’s no product and the thing runs for 90 minutes—there’s a void of purpose at the center of every scene. You flit between “Why does this theatrically released motion picture look so bad?” and “When are they going to reveal the car or printer this is clearly angling for me to purchase?”
Sony Pictures (via the now century-old Columbia Pictures studio) does not have an in-house streaming service, a choice that may prove to be a wise move over time in an ever-shrinking market. But Harold and the Purple Crayon will likely belong to an updated class of Fake Movie: a theatrical flop that makes up its losses with a streaming service sale (back in the day, this strategy worked by selling a film to cable networks or flogging it on VHS). All of this inside baseball context is more interesting than the film itself, but it also feels woven into what we’re seeing on-screen.
Yes, the stakes are laughable, the characterization is non-existent and the magic looks fake. But if you’re cogent enough to have these thoughts while watching Harold and the Purple Crayon, then the film is not for you. Whether it’s Sony execs updating spreadsheets or parents putting something on to distract their kids, Harold is most valuable to people who won’t watch it. Make sure you’re one of them.
Director: Carlos Saldanha
Writer: David Guion, Michael Handelman
Starring: Zachary Levi, Lil Rel Howery, Benjamin Bottani, Jemaine Clement, Tanya Reynolds, Alfred Molina, Zooey Deschanel
Release Date: August 2, 2024
Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.