Derivative expansion of the children’s book finds the hero growing up to be Zachary Levi and entering the realm of reality.
“Harold and the Purple Crayon,” the famed 1955 children’s picture book, is getting the three-dimensional treatment nearly 70 years after its release.
The picture book, written and illustrated by Crockett Johnson, follows Harold, a child who can create whatever he can imagine, so long as he draws it with his magic purple crayon. The film adaptation opens with a short animated sequence that gives life to the book’s famous illustrations. But how far can a children’s picture book stretch across a 92-minute movie? Not very.
After the film gets through the book’s story in about a minute, the narrator says that the book’s ending was not the close of Harold’s story. Cut to an animated adult Harold, all grown up but still in a onesie, with his purple sketched friends, Moose and Porcupine, as they venture around their two-dimensional existence and wonder what goes on in “the real world.”
Harold (Zachary Levi) draws a door labeled “Real World” and walks through it. He’s then miraculously spit out in Providence, Rhode Island, as a “real” person. Moose and Porcupine, played by Lil Rel Howery and Tanya Reynolds, respectively, follow through the magical door shortly after.
