‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’ Review: A Powerless, Unimaginative Ode to the Power of Imagination

“Harold and the Purple Crayon” is a picture book — now a movie — about the importance of imagination. So let’s try to imagine something together, shall we? Let’s all imagine a film starring Zooey Deschanel as an employee of a great big store who meets a childlike fantasy character who left home and now enters the real world in search of his father, who messes up the store she works at but ultimately teaches her a valuable lesson about believing in magic.

Have you got that film in your head? Does it look exactly like the movie “Elf,” that Christmas classic that came out over 20 years ago? Well, now imagine that it’s very purple, not very funny, and it stars Zachary Levi instead of Will Ferrell. “Harold and the Purple Crayon” claims to be about the power of the creative spirit but it’s cobbled together from so many similar films —“Enchanted,” “Hook,” “Shazam!,” even a little “Last Action Hero” — that it seems to have forgotten it was supposed to be about Crockett Johnson’s “Harold and the Purple Crayon.”

There’s Harold, of course, and there is indeed a purple crayon. The film, directed by Oscar-nominee Carlos Saldanha (“Ferdinand”), begins with an animated speed run through Johnson’s already brief original book, narrated by Alfred Molina. It’s about a little boy named Harold who goes on an adventure and solves all his problems by drawing things with a purple crayon which then become real.

Cut to years later and Harold has grown into an animated young man with two animal sidekicks, Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds, the only adult actor in this movie trying to make it interesting). When Harold’s narrator/creator/father suddenly disappears, he draws a door to the real world and goes searching for him. Now he’s played by Zachary Levi, giving almost exactly the same wide-eyed, one-note performance he gave in “Shazam! Fury of the Gods.”

Harold is joined in his adventure by Moose and Porcupine, who for reasons the movie never even tries to explain, become human beings in the real world. Except sometimes Moose turns into a real moose when he gets scared. Do not attempt to make sense of how the magic works in “Harold and the Purple Crayon.” They will never explain it to you.

Fortunately, Harold’s purple crayon still works, so soon he’s building bicycles and airplanes and delicious pies and anything else that seems useful. When Harold and Moose get hit by a car they’re taken in by an exasperated single mother, Terri (Deschanel), whose son Mel (Benjamin Bottani) has an imaginary friend who Harold and Moose can also apparently see. (Oh, Porcupine? She gets lost on her own for most of the film, for no perceptible narrative or thematic reason.)

Harold’s search for his father takes him on many mild, unremarkable adventures. Eventually they wander into the local library, where a failed YA author called “Library Gary” (Jemaine Clement) figures out where Harold came from. Instead of being awestruck by this revelation that worlds of fiction can come to life, and then reassessing his entire existence and belief structure, Library Gary immediately decides to steal Harold’s crayon so he can turn himself into a villainous character from his unpublished book.

Eventually, Harold and Gary fight using whatever they can think of drawing. It was important, I guess, for the makers of “Harold and the Purple Crayon” to show that the magical drawing aspect from a book for very young children could also be used to make cool weapons. I’m not sure why, other than to arbitrarily add stakes to a film whose whole plot is also largely arbitrary. Early in this movie Mel receives half a purple crayon as a gift from Harold, but instead of letting his imagination run wild he just puts it in his pocket and forgets about it until the plot can’t move forward unless he remembers. Oh yes. He’s had unlimited power at his fingertips this whole time. How easy it is to forget about being a literal god on Earth when you’ve got homework to distract you instead.

Saldanha’s adaptation, credited to David Guion and Michael Handelman (“Slumberland”), is a collection of fish out of water and magical friend clichés tied together by an unexplored and slightly confused theme about the transformative power of imagination and narrative fiction. It’s funny how when you just go through the motions you never seem to get anywhere, but that’s “Harold and the Purple Crayon.” It’s a mostly harmless time-waster of a motion picture; functionally a movie but without too much of that pesky depth or entertainment getting in the way.

“Harold” deserves better and to be fair, he’s had better: The 1959 animated adaptation of Crockett Johnson’s original book is still just as enchanting as it’s always been. You can watch it in seven minutes and let it inspire you to come up with your own stories, your own characters, and your own worlds. And there’s a very good chance they’ll be more interesting than this new film.

A Sony Pictures release, “Harold and the Purple Crayon” opens in theaters on Aug. 2.

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