Sony Pictures

If you haven’t seen the new live-action Harold and the Purple Crayon, you may be surprised to learn that the movie is better than the trailer promises. It’s not Paddington 2 or My Neighbor Totoro. But the Harold movie is also a comfortable distance from, say, the Mike Myers Cat in the Hat movie, which gets my vote for all-time worst adaptation of a children’s book.

My criteria for “worst” or “best” has nothing to do with how “faithful” the film is. To say that a movie is not faithful to the book sidesteps the question of what a faithful adaptation might look like. Developing a 90-minute film out of a 64-page picture book will require changes to the source material. When both duration and medium change, so too must the story.

The new Harold movie actually acknowledges this fact when, in its opening few minutes, it offers an animated summary of Harold and the Purple Crayon, announces “The End,” and then says “Just kidding.” The film then changes the animation style, and a purportedly adult Harold launches himself from Crockett Johnson’s book into the real world in search of the narrator—voiced by Alfred Molina and later revealed to be Johnson himself.

Having the character going in search of his author extends the metaphysical, metafictional ideas of the original Harold series, and evokes the imaginative terrain of childhood—its porous boundaries between fantasy and reality, and that sense that dreams can transform the world. It’s a great choice, grounded in Johnson’s creative logic.

The film’s central flaw is its version of an adult Harold. The notion of an adult Harold is not the problem, nor is Zachary Levi’s performance in that role. A grown-up Harold is a promising premise, and has been explored before. D. Gilson’s “Harold & the Purple Crayon” (2017), one of a series of poems imagining children’s book characters outside of the books, uses the idea to consider, humorously, how a child genius copes with adulthood.

The problem is that, though the film’s narrative asserts that Levi is portraying a grown-up Harold, it actually gives us a child character in the body of an adult human. Movie-Harold is adult-sized, but he has not grown up emotionally or intellectually. As a result, he seems another Hollywood man-child. We’re supposed to see his cluelessness as charming, and the attendant chaos as hilarious. At one point in the film, Harold even says, “I don’t do a lot of thinking. I’m more of an improv guy.”

But Crockett Johnson’s Harold is very thoughtful. The first book opens with Harold “thinking it over for some time,” and all seven "Harold" books encourage thoughtful use of the imagination. When Harold draws more pie than he can eat, he creates a “very hungry moose and a deserving porcupine” to share it with. When, in Harold’s Trip to the Sky, he draws a scary Martian in a flying saucer, Harold worries that it might frighten a little child. So, after initially running away, he sneaks back to draw a “completely damaging crack in the flying saucer.”

The movie man-child Harold does have good intentions, and, as he says, he genuinely wants his crayon “to make people happy.” But his status as adult naïf can collide with those intentions, as when he uses the purple crayon to turn a toy helicopter into a functioning one, endangering its child pilot, or when he makes himself the pilot of a plane that he doesn’t really know how to fly. Were Harold played by a child, these choices would be understandable. Since the film’s Harold is supposedly an adult, his enthusiasm ought to be tempered by experience.

Imagination without thoughtfulness can easily become narcissism—an idea explored in several satirical works imagining then-President Trump as a Harold-like character, beginning in the first book-length parody of Johnson’s book. Published in 2018, Donald and the Golden Crayon by “P. Shauers” (a prolific author of children’s books, writing under a pseudonym) uses the crayon as a visual metaphor for Trump’s gaslighting—Donald draws the very things that, he insists, do not exist.

To be fair, the movie does warn against the narcissistic imagination via Librarian Gary (Jemaine Clement), a self-absorbed unpublished writer of high fantasy. The film’s most fully realized character, he wants to use the crayon to make himself the title character of his novel and to exact revenge on all who have doubted his creative genius. Clement’s satirical portrayal of Gary is as close as the movie gets to Johnson’s wry sense of humor, a wit that depends more on verbal subtlety than on visual gags.

My favorite part of the film is its charmingly idealistic notion that Crockett Johnson's home is now a museum. There’s something sweet in the idea that homes of beloved children’s authors become public places in which to celebrate their life and work. I was unaccountably moved to see my research in those scenes—notably, the 1943 photo of Johnson drawing his comic strip Barnaby, a photo which had been forgotten until I published it in my biography of Johnson and his wife, fellow-children’s book author Ruth Krauss.

In the second visit to Johnson’s museum-home, which takes place near the film’s end, the curator gives Harold a letter from Johnson, in which the author explains why he wrote Harold and the Purple Crayon: “I wanted to show folks that with a little imagination, you can make your life better if you want it to be. We only have so much time in this world. Life isn’t something that just happens to you. It’s something you create. The trick is in the imagining.” Johnson said no such thing, but it’s not a bad thesis statement for Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Though it’s fun to hear Johnson’s voice (which, in real life, was slower-paced than Molina’s rendition), a more successful adaptation would trust its narrative to convey its ideas, instead of summoning the author from the great beyond.

I’ve been corresponding with a friend who actually knew Crockett Johnson—editor Susan Hirschman, who was an editorial assistant for Ursula Nordstrom at Harper in the 1950s. She loathes the trailer, though was pleased by A.O. Scott’s lovely piece in the New York Times Book Review. She asked if I wondered what Johnson would think about all this too late appreciation. Here’s my response.

I think he would be both amused and pleased by the appreciation and would have a wry comment about the film adaptation—a wry comment that could be interpreted in more than one way. People who knew Johnson would understand it as critical, but the filmmakers might miss the edges of its irony. He might say something like: “Huh. I didn’t remember all of that being in my little book. I guess I’d better re-read it.”

It’s also my advice to you. Instead of heading for the theater, go to the library. Re-read Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Philip Nel is the author of How to Draw the World: Harold and the Purple Crayon and the Making of a Children’s Classic (Nov. 2024, Oxford University Press).