"Harold and the Purple Crayon" could have been garbage, but was okay
There have been a LOT of second-rate kids’ movies releasing in recent memory, and they only seem to be getting worse. It’s very ironic how unimaginative story writers can be when it comes to movies discussing the importance of imagination and dreams.
For instance, we have John Krasinski’s “If,” which came about after someone said, “what IF we used AI to write every line of dialogue in this movie?”
There’s also “Migration,” that I’m positive no one on planet Earth watched. Who can forget the absolute travesty that was “Megamind vs. The Doom Syndicate?”
How these projects continue to get green-lighted is beyond me, because if I was a Hollywood executive and someone played a clip from any of those movies looking for funding, they’d be leaving the office in the back of a squad car.
Sometimes a movie like this can get really lucky and attract the attention of people outside their demographic. We saw this when teenage boys dressed in rent-a-tuxes to watch “Minions: The Rise of Gru” in theaters or when “Morbius” was so ridiculously bad that the internet collectively pretended that it was the next “Citizen Kane”.
The latest of these situations is “Harold and the Purple Crayon” which is based on a 1955 book of the same name.
Internet meme pages have once again taken a mediocre children’s movie and claimed it to be the second coming of “12 Angry Men.” The most popular use so far has been saying that the film’s box office sales were over “a purpillion dollars,” which is significantly more than “a Morbillion dollars” monetarily.
So was it really that bad? Rotten Tomatoes only gave it a 25%, but the audience score is over 90%. I’m not sure who to trust, so I took it upon myself to check it out.
At first glance, I can absolutely see how this movie would be hot garbage. A studio is taking an old children’s book and wants to make it a feature film.
The screenplay also went through multiple changes; it has technically been in development for nearly 13 years before release. On top of that, you have some A-minus list actors that are usually expected to carry the lazy writing with their acting chops and humor.
Both of these are usually big hints that a movie is going to absolutely bomb. But honestly, I didn’t think it was that bad.
Everything I saw from it was pretty solid compared to the other atrocities Hollywood keeps throwing at today’s youth.
The tried-and-true premise of a cartoon character dealing with the hardships of the real world works well in “Harold and the Purple Crayon.” Harold has to learn that there are consequences for his childish actions, most notably catching the attention of the main antagonist.
The viewing experience itself isn’t bad either. The dialogue is decent, though it’s hard to make anything Zachary Levi or Zoey Deschanel say unfunny or boring. The CGI is well done all throughout, and the transitions from crayon drawing to real-life objects were pretty much seamless.
All in all, I think it’s worth the watch, whether in theaters or on whatever streaming service they add it to in the near future.
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