Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon, a staple of US children’s fiction for about 70 years, here gets a nondescript, inoffensive big-screen translation from one of the men behind the Ice Age franchise. Johnson enthusiasts may baulk at the move from bold, simple lines to a messy collision of animation and (mostly) live-action comedy. Most everyone else will barely notice the images as they pass through the brain without touching the edges.
The boy with the crayon that creates magically solid objects here becomes a harmless child-man in the person of Zachary Levi. For reasons that hardly justify explaining, he is propelled into the real world with Lil Rel Howery as Moose (a moose) and Tanya Reynolds as Porcupine (a porcupine). The rules here are a bit slapdash. Harold seems to be pretty much as he was in the book’s universe. But Moose and Porcupine find themselves as mooseish and porcupinal human beings. None has any understanding how the harsh, modern-day United States works, but, happily, within minutes of reaching Paddington Station, nice Mr Brown has found Harold and taken him back to posh west London.
I’m joking, of course, but the main plot does essentially stick to the outlines of that ursine film series. Here Zooey Deschanel, playing a nurse and single mom, is persuaded to shelter the irritating Harold by Benjamin Bottani as her perky son. Before long we are on a quest to find the “Old Man” who created Harold’s world; a quest that, despite Johnson living and dying in Connecticut, keeps us in Rhode Island. (We can only assume that state’s film authority offered more enticing inducements.)
Anyway, as with so many of these things, the inclusive lesson-learning is not nearly so amusing as the ill-spirited sniping from the necessary villain. All hail Jemaine Clement as an evil librarian – essentially a retread of his character from the underrated Gentleman Broncos – who wants to use the purple crayon for evil ends.
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That is not enough. One wishes the studio well on its late-summer swing for the boundary, but, with little of Crockett’s original charm remaining, the audience is left with a generic entertainment struggling to find a reason to exist beyond the need for more “content”. As soon seen as forgotten.
