Harold and the Purple Crayon

The latest movie in my cinematic year was a trip to see Harold and the Purple Crayon on Sunday night. Based on a children's picture book by Crockett Johnson, it starts out in the animated world of the book character, a boy whose magic crayon gives him the power to bring anything he draws to life. At first, he's happy with his adventures, his loyal friends – a moose and a porcupine that he created himself – and the disembodied narrator he calls "old man" (voiced by Alfred Molina). But then the narrator goes silent, and Harold decides to travel to the Real World to look for him and find out what's wrong. Which, naturally, he does by drawing a door with a sign on it saying "Real World."

Fish-out-of-water hijinks ensue. Harold turns into Zachary Levi, clad in all-purple overalls that give real-world people the wrong idea. Worse, running at anyone who looks like an old man with open arms gets him poked with a couple of canes. Moose, transformed into a human (Lil Rel Howery) adds to the weirdness, while Porcupine (British actress Tanya Reynolds) falls behind and finds herself in trouble with the law. Harold and Moose have a literal run-in with a mom (Zooey Deschanel) and her young son, who already suffers socially because of his wild imagination, and obviously, she doesn't believe him when he starts enthusing about Harold's magic crayon. The penny doesn't even drop when Harold repaints her house (purple, of course) and fills the kitchen with blueberry pies. Adults are so oblivious!

But things really start to go crazy when the kid offers to skip school to help Harold and Moose find the old man. The movie becomes resistant to synopsis from about here forward, but it's very eventful and raucously funny. Stuff happens at the boy's school, the mom's workplace and, most fatefully, under the nasty eye of the head librarian, who fancies Terri (the mom) and is frustrated in his ambition as a fantasy novelist. Gary, as this creep is called, played by New Zealander Jemaine Clement, seems to have a complete collection of recessive genes, but that doesn't stop him from trying to win Terri's heart and/or absolute world domination, whichever he can achieve first by stealing Harold's crayon.

Harold's journey is sometimes scary, sometimes sad, and definitely a lot heavier than you would expect based on the source material, but the magic is impressive and the adventure comes full circle in an effective story shape. And also, it's magically hilarious. It has drawn-by-a-kid-at-heart machines that really go, from a helicopter to an airplane, a hot air balloon to a motorcycle; to say nothing of creatures, like the alternately cute and terrifying spider-fly and the boy's imaginary friend, which becomes real by what magic I'm sure you know. The cast all does a fine job, and as a boy in the shape of a man, Zachary Levi is in his element (see also Shazam). And if you hang out for a bit of the end credits, you'll be rewarded by a cute bonus scene. Overall, I just want to say this was exactly the movie I hoped it would be, and I really enjoyed it – a nice change after the fiasco of IF.

Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) All hell breaks loose at the store where Terri works, thanks to Harold and his crayon. (2) Harold loses faith in himself, so that the magic he has created starts to disappear. (3) Faith restored, Harold fights back against the nefarious Gary.