Growing up, I loved the children’s novel “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” So when the Hollywood film version came along, you’d better believe I was primed. Like the book, the movie was about a family with a father who builds a magical flying car. But any similarity ended there. The book’s tone was cool and dry and deadpan irreverent — the author, after all, was Ian Fleming of James Bond fame — but the movie was a wacked piece of ersatz-Disney musical kitsch. Fleming’s debonair absurdist saga of gangsters and hair’s-breadth escapes was replaced by a broad fairy tale featuring a kidnapper called the Child Catcher. Watching the movie, I kept wondering when the real story — the one I’d loved — would start; somehow, it never did. What happened to it? By the time the movie was over, I had suffered the 9-year-old’s once-upon-a-time equivalent of PTSD.
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There was a villain at work, of course, but I don’t mean the Child Catcher. It was the executives at United Artists who were so eager to make a movie out of this book that they somehow decided the book wasn’t good enough. They destroyed Fleming’s funky kiddie concoction in order to adapt it. But you’ve got to say this for those executives: They set the template, one that stands to this day, for how four out of five movie adaptations of children’s books are made.
Take a popular kids’ tome; squeeze the juicy idiosyncrasy out of it; swap in standard corporate entertainment parts; and voilà, you have a hit! (Or that’s the theory.) To the scroll of children’s-book adaptations that squander the very spirit of what they should be doing (“Harriet the Spy,” Stuart Little,” “Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat,” “Mr. Popper’s Penguins”…the list goes on and on), we can now add “Harold and the Purple Crayon.” The movie is adapted from Crockett Johnson’s elemental picture book, which was published in 1955 (it was followed by half a dozen sequels) and was so simple it seemed magical: Harold, a four-year-old boy with the bald head of a baby (and the innocence of one too), has a big purple crayon that allows him to draw pictures in the air of anything he imagines; the objects then become real. Harold, in his way, was the kiddie version of a visual-effects artist, and the film adaptation of “Harold” is all about the effects.
The title character, played by the grown-up prankster Zachary Levi (huh? More on that in a moment), starts off as a cartoon figure living in a drawn world, kind of like the world of the books. But then, having been abandoned by his “old man” creator, he lands in the real world, and “Harold and the Purple Crayon” instantly converts to that quintessential formula: the fish-out-of-water comedy. It’s also one of those movies in which a live-action universe becomes the backdrop for an animated character like Garfield or Sonic. Except that the “character,” in this case, is simply the drawings that Harold does. Over the course of the movie, he draws a spare tire, a two-seater bike, pies and ice cream, skateboards and roller skates, a gleaming propeller plane, a giant lock and wrecking ball (to escape a prison), a griffin, and a spider-fly with vicious teeth.
Even young viewers of “Harold and the Purple Crayon” may feel they’ve seen versions of most of these effects before. For what made the book special wasn’t just that Harold could draw anything. It was the wide-eyed feeling with which he did it.
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“Harold” the movie replaces wide eyes with audience-tested conceits, starting with the fact that someone thought Zachary Levi’s performance as a kid-inside-an-adult-superhero’s-body in the first “Shazam!” would somehow make him perfect to play Harold. But where Levi’s performance in “Shazam!” was sly and understated, here, walking around in what looks like the world’s weirdest Hawaiian shirt, he’s all gawky, eager, italicized-kid overacting. Harold has two animal sidekicks, both of whom appear in human form: Moose, played with antic glee by Lil Rel Howery, and Porcupine, who appears as a purple-mohawked punk played by the fiery Tanya Reynolds, who someone should waste no time casting in a Sinéad O’Connor biopic.
The director, Carlos Saldanha, a veteran of animation (“Rio,” the “Ice Age” films), stages the dramatic arcs in David Guion and Michael Handelman’s screenplay as if they were made of pasteboard. Harold and company befriend young Mel (Benjamin Bottani) and his widowed mother, Terry (Zooey Deschanel, in one of those hardheaded-mom-who’s-the-only-sane-person-in-the-room roles). The kid has replaced his missing father with imaginary friends, and it’s the kick of Harold’s drawings that’s supposed to bring joy back to his life.
Then there is Harold’s search for his mysterious “old man,” a tedious crusade that culminates, in a mildly touching way, with a visit to Crockett Johnson’s home. There is also a bad-guy librarian (Jemaine Clement) who has written a Tolkien-knockoff fantasy novel called “The Glaive of Gagaroh” (which no one can pronounce), and who wants to use the purple crayon to bring the book to life. If this had happened a bit earlier in the movie, it might have livened things up. “Harold and the Purple Crayon” is too wedded to formulas it didn’t need to tap your nostalgia. The film ends with an overly spelled-out plea for the value of “imagination,” but about the only thing the filmmakers are drawing with their purple crayon is algorithms.
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