“Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the White Queen famously declares in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Nearly all of the best children’s books are full of impossible things: talking bears and spiders, magical wardrobes and toll booths, or crayons that turn imagination into reality.
Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson’s 1955 classic, is one such story. During a recent event at the Library of Congress, actress Zooey Deschanel described it as the elusive book that holds the attention of both children and parents .
“I read it so many times to my kids just because it’s so sweet,” she said. “Every time you’re delighted by the end.”
Harold is a simple tale of a little boy who creates the world of his choosing with a magic crayon. He runs into danger of his own making, a “terribly frightening dragon,” for instance, but rescues himself with quick thinking — after he falls, a hot air balloon will do the trick. When he is ready to go home, he draws his bedroom window around the moon, makes his bed, and falls asleep.
This may seem like too little story to adapt for the screen, but a new film starring Deschanel and Zachary Levi has done so — and done it endearingly, following both the letter and the spirit of Johnson’s work.
The whole book makes up only the film’s first few moments — we are introduced to Harold (Levi), his magical crayon, and his friends: the moose and porcupine. Suddenly, Harold grows into an adult, ever expanding his two-dimensional world but still happy to explore it, guided by the narrator, who is meant to be Johnson. One day, the narrator goes quiet, and Harold sets out into the real world to find him.
What he finds, as is often the case in children’s stories, is that the real world is a land of dead-end jobs and delayed dreams. He and Moose quickly run into, or rather, are run into by, a preteen boy, Mel, and his mother, Terry (Deschanel).
Mel has two major problems: a dead father and a habit of speaking to an imaginary animal friend, Carl. Harold can only help with one of these problems, but rather than dismiss Carl as a childish emotional crutch, as Mel’s mother does, Harold gives Mel the ability to bring Carl, and much more, to life via a piece of the magic crayon. Their hijinks cause various headaches for Terry until they all must face an evil librarian who gets ahold of the crayon and uses it to antagonize them as a character from his unpublished fantasy manuscript.
Of course, all ends happily, though Harold has to go through some soul searching in the process. He never finds the narrator — Johnson died in 1975, after all. This raises the question of why the film isn’t set in the 1970s. The aesthetic would have been more fitting for how nostalgic this story feels, though that undercurrent of precise realism involving a real-world death may have been a bit much for young children.
Instead of meeting the narrator, Harold finds the fictional Crockett Johnson House, where he learns about the author and reads a fictional mission statement of sorts for the book: “I wanted to show folks that with a little imagination, you can make your life better if you want it to be. We only have so much time in this world. Life isn’t something that just happens to you. It’s something you create. The trick is in the imagining.”
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Johnson biographer Philip Nel wrote of the line: “Johnson said no such thing, but it’s not a bad thesis statement for Harold and the Purple Crayon.”
The deeper lesson revealed by the film may be that while our imaginations are boundless, they are not omnipotent. In the end, Mel gets to keep his actualized imaginary friend, but not his share of the crayon, and Harold has to return to the world of his book. Imagination can take Harold to many places, but it always, as in the book, brings him home.
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