Harold and the Purple Crayon (2024)

August 5, 2024 12:02 AM

Inside of his book, adventurous Harold can make anything come to life simply by drawing it. After he grows up and draws himself off the book's pages and into the physical world, Harold finds he has a lot to learn about real life.
posted by TheophileEscargot (7 comments total)

My kid asked to see this one. He seemed pretty entertained though not on the edge of his seat hysterical about it. The slapstick appealed to him, especially the great sequence where they trash the department store, but that was spread pretty thin. Not much their for adults apart from Jemaine Clement's great performance as the fantasy-nerd baddie

Neither of us have read the original books which were apparently very different. Those who have seem pretty disappointed with the movie.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 12:06 AM on August 5

Taking a quiet, intimate story, so gentle and humane on the page, and blowing it up into the usual Hollywood screaming overkill CGI thundering soundtrack smug mugging hypermeta fare just seems sad. Saw the trailer and noped out right off. It's a shame, too—such a lovely book to base something on.
posted by sonascope at 7:14 AM on August 7 [4 favorites]

I thought it was a very generic kids movie - and the saddest thing was the best the writers did with the crayon for the most part was cause mayhem. It had some gentle scenes and some laughs, but it had a lot more wild pointless destruction, and peering at sadness and poverty (I guess?) without taking a hard look.

I'm not a huge fan of the Shazam guy as an actor and they gave Zoey Deschanel almost nothing to work with. Jemaine Clement did the most with very little as well.

There was a weird set of bully scenes with the kid at school that went completely unresolved too. They could have left that part out and not changed a thing about the story.

It was nice to see Ravi B Patel from Animal Control in a different role and almost unrecognizable.

In kids movies lately, it was just really generic, and not off the wall bad like the karaoke end of Despicable Me 4.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:03 AM on August 7

The books definitely serve as an idea, but not as an inspiration it seems, at least based on your reviews here and the trailer. I've read through them a number of times and the magic crayon is very much a tool used to go forth on an adventure and to solve problems. Maybe that is reflected in the film? But there's definitely nothing high energy about it and I didn't see one deserving porcupine in the trailer.
posted by Atreides at 12:07 PM on August 7

But there's definitely nothing high energy about it and I didn't see one deserving porcupine in the trailer.

The animals turn into people for some reason in the real world.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:29 PM on August 7 [1 favorite]

I was never that fond of the book, myself, and when I saw the trailer I was like, wow, it's wild that so few kids' movies get made but they went ahead and made this one. Because as much as I'm not personally a fan of Harold and the Purple Crayon, I can recognize what people love about it, and the trailer made it very clear that the team that made the movie did not.
posted by potrzebie at 5:45 PM on August 8

I too saw the trailer and noped right out of it. Harold is one of my favorite book characters. And purple became my favorite color when I read these as a wee kindergarten lass. I think I checked the books out of the school library every week for months.
posted by kathrynm at 8:26 AM on August 25 [1 favorite]