Harold And The Purple Crayon Review: A Dull Waste Of A Colorful Children's Classic

"Harold and the Purple Crayon" begins with a brief intro into the world of the beloved children's story, explaining how Harold and his crayon actually work. Then there's a fakeout "The End" title card, with the narrator assuring us that he's just kidding. This is in fact the cruelest thing he could possibly do, because looking back, I would pay a not insignificant amount of money for "Harold and the Purple Crayon" to end right then and there. It's almost impressive that a movie all about the power of imagination could be so creatively bankrupt and incurious about the world, but this misguided kids' film manages to be all that and so much more (or less, depending on your perspective).

Harold (Zachary Levi) is a goofy little man-child, happily having two-dimensional adventures with his best friends, Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds). With his little purple crayon, he's able to bring to life anything he can draw — he's limited only by the bounds of his imagination. But one day, his narrator (Alfred Molina) mentions the real world, which gets Harold thinking: Why shouldn't he get to explore the real world? So he draws a door labeled "Real World," and off they go. 

But reality outside of cartoons isn't quite what Harold and his friends expected. They are faced with the prospect of actual pain when they meet young Mel (Benjamin Bottani) and his mother Terry (Zooey Deschanel), who are still recovering from the death of their father and husband, respectively. Their search to find the narrator — who they refer to only as "Old Man" — goes nowhere fast. And this is to say nothing of the local librarian (Jemaine Clement), who plots to steal the crayon so that he can bring the intricate world of his unpublished fantasy novel to life.

You can almost imagine some version of this movie working with a '90s-era Brendan Fraser in the lead role, playing Harold as clueless and hopelessly earnest, but with a giant heart beneath the surface. Sadly, Zachary Levi is no Fraser: His acting style is so presentational that it actually becomes creepy — he can do the whole man-child schtick, as we've seen the actor do in "Shazam!", but there's no warmth or personality underneath. He's just a gaping charisma void, and the movie suffers for it. It certainly doesn't help that he has no discernible character arc — the Harold that begins the movie is exactly the same Harold that ends it, giving us just one more reason to wonder why we should even care about any of his exploits if they're not leading to something. 

Tanya Reynolds as Porcupine seems like she actually understands the assignment and is a lot of fun to watch, but they inexplicably sideline her for the majority of the film so that Harold and Moose's one-note performances can bounce tonelessly against one another. And not for nothing, but whose sick idea was it to cast former "New Girl" star Zooey Deschanel as the mom who won't stand for the wacky chaos that Harold brings along with him? If you manage to make Deschanel, queen of the quirky polka dot, flat and colorless, you know you've taken a serious wrong turn somewhere.

There's a certain arithmetic filmmakers have to do when they're making a movie about cartoon characters who have been thrust into the real world. It's not complicated: Basically, their over-the-top antics are allowed, but they need to be held in check with a positive ratio between destructive and helpful. It gets annoying for audiences to watch characters like Harold gleefully wreak havoc on the lives around them with no thought of anyone else, and only rarely do something nice to make up for it. 

"Harold and the Purple Crayon" does not, to put it lightly, maintain the balance. What Harold chooses to create unleashes a whole new set of problems, highlighting how little creativity the entire production team was willing to invest in "Harold and the Purple Crayon." He can create anything in the entire world, and this is what we get? A skating ramp? Painting Mel and Terry's house purple? The unholy birth of the spider fly? They needed to think bigger, and the fact that the entire message of the film (if you want to be kind enough to ascribe one to it) is that there are no limits to the creative possibilities of your imagination ... well, that makes all of this especially damning.

A trite message. No characters worth caring about, or that aren't paper thin with no development. Although the characters have been brought into the real world, for all intents and purposes they're still on that blank page, with absolutely no dimension. No real sense of humor — there are gags in the film, but none of them seem like they would entertain even the youngest and most generous audiences. What a waste of a classic children's book.

"Harold and the Purple Crayon" is in theaters now.