+[WATCH MOVIE]+ Harold and the Purple Crayon 2024 FuLL Movie 1080 Stream

Like other misguided, feature-length adaptations of children’s stories — see just about every film based on a Dr. Seuss book — Harold and the Purple Crayon keeps adding more uninspired narrative colors to a work that was much more fascinating when it was closer to monochrome.

Harold befriends a preteen named Mel (Benjamin Bottani) who recently lost his father, as well as Mel’s skeptical mom, Terri (Zooey Deschanel, trying and failing to seem engaged in this endeavor), who aid his efforts to track down the Old Man. So does Gary (Jemaine Clement), a local librarian whose real ambition is to write sexually tinged fantasy novels and sees Harold’s crayon as a way to finally realize his freaky dreams.

Harold and the Purple Crayon spends a lot of its time trying to coast off the familiar charms of a fish-out-of-water story. When he isn’t looking around with mouth-agape awe at the wonders of modern society — e.g., the massive amount of inventory at his local Ollie’s — Levi’s Harold is smiling and scrunching up his nose so we can see how much of a cutie pie he is. Levi plays the character as if he’s deliberately trying to deliver a less nuanced version of Tom Hanks’s performance in Big, right down to a montage in which Terri plays “Chopsticks” on a crayon-generated purple piano while elsewhere, Harold nibbles away on an itty-bitty piece of baby corn.

But paying homage to Big doesn’t make your movie as good as Big. Harold and the Purple Crayon makes the classic Hollywood mistake of taking a story that was lovely because of its concision and simplicity and turns it into a movie that is overly long and complicated for no good reason. By the end, I had no interest in having access to a magic crayon. What I really wanted was a magic eraser, one that could wipe away this silly, aggressively unnecessary film.