Harold and the Purple Crayon review – garish and charmless kids fantasy dud

Plenty of actors will talk about doing the occasional family film in order to make something that their kids might enjoy. Film-makers, meanwhile, will often specialize in the form, becoming go-to directors or screenwriters who can help crack the code for all-ages entertainment. Why, then, are there so many family films that seem to be made with only the faintest, wispiest, flimsiest familiarity with actual children?

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Earlier this summer, John Krasinski’s heartfelt yet idiotic If misunderstood imaginary friends as endemic to elementary-school-aged children rather than toddlers. Now comes Harold and the Purple Crayon, an adaptation of the classic picture book by Crockett Johnson. In it, the lead child, Melvin (Benjamin Bottani), appears to be verging on middle-school age, yet still earnestly refers to an imaginary dog that he claims accompanies him everywhere. It’s supposed to be a reaction to the death of Mel’s father; as in If, it’s actually a red flag of screenwriters’ misleading ideas, quietly warped in their simplicity, about how kids deal with grief.

Mel’s mom, Terri (Zooey Deschanel), gently encourages him to maybe make some real friends. But Harold (Zachary Levi), a refugee from the 2D animated world based on the book’s illustrations, takes the opposite tactic, happily indulging Mel’s belief in his nonexistent pet when he meets the family for the first time. It seems like we’re supposed to think he’s playfully connecting with the kid in a way that other adults don’t know how, but Levi plays Harold with such aggressive aw-shucks mugging that he never erases the possibility that Harold himself is simply an enthusiastic and dangerous sharer of whatever delusions are at hand.

Those familiar with the book (and its sequels) may be asking themselves: isn’t Harold, like, a baby? The answer is basically yes: as depicted in the book, Harold is a cutely blobby preschool-aged kid with a magical purple crayon that brings to life anything he draws. In the movie, Harold grows up, sort of, into a cartoon version of an adult man, cavorting with his self-created animal sidekicks, Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds), and comforted by the presence of his unseen narrator. When the narrator’s voice disappears, Harold, Moose and Porcupine decide to track him down in the real world. In making the jump to live action, the animals become human, but the magic crayon can still create anything its artist can think of, and upends the lives of Mel and Terri in the process. (Porcupine is also separated from the group, mainly so the film-makers have something to cut away to occasionally.) The movie knows that there should a lesson somewhere in here, so it lands, rather arbitrarily, somewhere between “be yourself” and “imagination is good”. Sure. Just the thing for a grieving, friendless child: being yourself.

Almost nothing in Harold and the Purple Crayon works. The characters don’t even make dream-logic sense; Reynolds, who gives the movie’s only good performance, retains the mannerisms of a porcupine in human form, while Howery just talks a bunch about being a moose while mostly looking and acting like a person – except for the scenes where he briefly turns into a CGI moose for the sake of additional cacophony. The story is predicated largely on the characters annoying a bunch of service workers, and driven in part by crassly opportunistic brand partnerships; a chunk of the film is set at Terri’s workplace, the American discount chain Ollie’s, and while she doesn’t like her job, the other characters repeatedly enthuse that “this place has everything!” The drab-looking visual effects set pieces mostly involve the characters boarding different, crayon-created methods of conveyance and yelling about how awesome and/or scary it is. In a touching bird-flip to the profession that has helped keep Crockett’s work alive for years, the bad guy is a selfish, preening librarian (Jemaine Clement, also reviving the pompous-author routine he’s beaten to death by now).

The director, Carlos Saldanha, comes from animation, where he worked for years at the now-defunct studio Blue Sky on the popular Ice Age movies, and whatever antic fluidity he brought to those middling projects disappears here in a purple haze. Haziest of all is Levi, who has taken the occasional incongruity of his performance in the Shazam movies (where he plays a sullen teenager in a grown-up body, but sometimes acts more like a motormouthed tween) and makes it the engine of this one. Levi scrunches up his face in strenuous paroxysms of delight, shifts Harold’s sophistication levels from scene to scene and passive-aggressively harangues Terri for bringing pesky real-world concerns to her single-parent household. It may be the single most exhausting lead performance of the year.

All in all, Levi makes an airtight case against Harold being aged into a childlike adult in the first place. What purpose does it serve, beyond rehashing some shtick that the film-makers must have realized, too late, wasn’t all that beloved? It seems likely that the combination of a man-child and Deschanel is supposed to evoke the timeless magic of Will Ferrell’s holiday comedy Elf, with the crucial distinction that Ferrell is funny. Harold and the Purple Crayon is not funny, not insightful about children, and it costs much more time and money to see than simply reading the books that it tries to turn into a meta-text. It makes imagination seem like a garish endurance test.

• Harold and the Purple Crayon is out in US and UK cinemas on 2 August, and in Australian cinemas on 12 September.