Harold and the Purple Crayon
Directed by Carlos Saldhana
Written by David Guion and Michael Handelman
90 minutes, rated PG
Reviewed by JAKE WILSON
★★

Who would have thought it - a children’s film about the power of the imagination. Harold and the Purple Crayon began in 1955 as a gracefully minimal picture book by the cartoonist Crockett Johnson, about a little boy whose drawings come to life. The concept has since been adapted a couple of times to animation, which seems to be its natural home.

Over the years there have also been multiple attempts to produce a live-action version, a project that has finally been realised in underwhelming fashion by director Carlos Saldhana (himself an animator, best-known for the Ice Age films). To flesh out the slender source material, some changes have been made: Harold, the boy with the magic crayon, is now a middle-aged man played by Zachary Levi, presumably cast on the strength of his Shazam! role as a teenager in an adult superhero’s body.

Accompanied by a couple of sidekicks (Lil Rel Howery and Tanya Reynolds), Harold escapes out of the pages of Johnson’s book into the real world of Providence, Rhode Island (or so we’re asked to believe: the locations are in Atlanta).

Accident-prone but well-meaning, he wins over the sceptical widow Terri (Zooey Deschanel) and her young son Mel (Benjamin Bottani), transforming their lives with his can-do spirit – a premise not a million miles from Elf, also with Deschanel, or Disney’s Enchanted, or more recently Barbie.

One thing all those movies had, which Harold lacks, is a star worthy of a comic vehicle. Tall and presentably handsome, Levi capers around with a big, goofy smile and a squeak in his voice – but there’s more desperation than humour in the performance, which suggests Vince Vaughn doing a half-hearted impression of Pee-wee Herman.

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The film also lacks a distinctive look, a puzzle given Saldhana’s experience with cartoon sight gags. Visually speaking, he and his team don’t seem sure how to integrate fantasy and reality, to the point where half the time they shy away from showing Harold using the crayon on screen.

All the same, the screenplay by David Guion and Michael Handelman eventually reveals itself as a complicated allegory about creativity, of the kind modern Hollywood seems especially fond. The core conflict is between two types of artist: where Harold remains a happy-go-lucky manchild, his nemesis Library Gary (Jermaine Clement) wants the crayon for selfish reasons to do with his designs on Terri and his ambitions as a young-adult fantasy writer.

One lesson kids could conceivably take from this would be “Don’t grow up”. In this light, it’s interesting that Gary is the only character permitted to joke about the phallic significance of the crayon, put to use by male characters exclusively: I suspect Clement invented some of his own dialogue, including the line where Gary imagines drawing himself a lookalike son.

Plainly we’re not meant to think about any of this too closely, another measure of the gap between this film and Barbie. But adults are also entitled to use their imaginations, in their own way.