Harold and the Purple Crayon

Perhaps one of the biggest film flops of the year, Harold and the Purple Crayon takes a beloved children’s story and turns into a desperate attempt at making Zachary Levi likable. Like the film, the attempt failed spectacularly.

So…the film starts with the actual Harold and the Purple Crayon story and it starts in animation which is how everyone kind of agreed this story should have been told. But then we jumped to Harold as an adult. Again, wouldn’t have been a problem if we had stayed in animation. See this could have been a great story about how when you grow up you lose your sense of wonder and imagination. His old friends could have come to him as an adult and tried to get him to remember their adventures. Instead they decided on the Enchanted approach and that was a mistake. It also could have been a story about not knowing where you come from and discovering yourself. We could have even had Harold come to the real world and then have his crayon not work and have to discover what magic means in the real world. There were so many options that they just didn’t do and what they went with was terrible.

Also this really makes it seem like Zachary Levi can’t do anything but act like a child. Now this is because he is aggressively immature in real life but bringing that into your resume is certainly a choice.

Moose turns into a human? I’m so sorry there is no narrative where that makes any sense at all. Why wouldn’t he turn into a real moose? I am so positive the people that made this have never seen a children’s movie before.

Not only is the acting truly terrible. The story is just atrocious, there is no actual narrative. The whole story is Harold trying to find his dad but since he has the mentality of a 6 year old from a fictional world there is no emotional tie to that. There is no internal connection or struggle to the man that he is looking for, no sense of not belonging, no concept of not knowing who you are.

Zoey Deschenal always seems to be the straight woman across from toddler like men, I would argue this applies to Nick Miller, then Elf and now this. That seems to be what she is good at though. This role kind of fits her.

An hour into the film and the conflict is very shallow and surface level and there is just nothing emotional happening at all. A well crafted children's film SHOULD make adults cry. There should be some sense of longing, or nostalgia for us. I LOVED Orion and the Dark, I think everything coming out of Dreamworks lately is next level beautiful. They are telling some incredible stories with deep emotional cores. So there is no excuse for other children’s films, like this one, to be so poorly written.

I give this film a very aggressive 3/10. The 3 is being really generous. I don’t think this film has any real redeeming qualities. The act structure is loose at best. The actual narrative is nothing and there is no emotion at all until the third act of the film. There is a weird subplot that goes nowhere and means nothing. The last 30 minutes of the film are probably where the story should have started. And of course it's biggest flaw was casting a very grown Zachary Levi. Kids movies centered around an adult just feels lazy and not very well thought out. There were 100 ways to do this movie and they chose the only wrong one.