Zachary Levi has experienced and is experiencing one of the strangest career trajectories in modern Hollywood. After making waves as a sitcom fixture, Levi exploded onto the scene as the star of Chuck. As Flynn Ryder, he became one of Disney’s most likable voice actors. Levi was on top of the world when he starred in one of the precious few good DCEU movies. In hardly half a decade, he seems to be persona non grata among audiences and critics. He accomplished that massive shift partially through projects like Harold and the Purple Crayon, which is currently #6 on HBO worldwide.
Zachary Levi’s Harold and the Purple Crayon Finally Finds its Audience on HBO
Harold and the Purple Crayon was a 1955 children’s book by Crockett Johnson. You may have fond memories of the charming, simplistic art style and the imaginative storyline. It follows a four-year-old who creates the world around him with a magical crayon. The 2024 film adaptation, for some reason, immediately leaps ahead 40 years to depict Zachary Levi in the title role. This was all most people needed to see, immediately casting the film in a bizarre light. It would have been fairly straightforward to cast a child and do something in the vein of the original novel, but doing so would have required a fairly significant deviation from the traditional kids’ movie format. Instead, this is a painfully generic venture that spits in the face of its central theme. It reminds me of 2003’s The Cat in the Hat, complete with comparably unpleasant visuals.
Oddly enough, Harold and the Purple Crayon had a very long and tortured production. It started in the early 1990s with Where the Wild Things Are writer Maurice Sendak. The first director to take the gig was Henry Selick, who eventually left to do James and the Giant Peach. Imagine this story in that context before watching Harold and the Purple Crayon to really shake up your expectations. Of course, both films flopped at the box office. Harold actually made less and cost more than James, falling $8 million short of its production budget. The two films were not as comparable in their critical reception. The pros hated Harold, but audience members hail it as a masterpiece. If you check the film’s audience rating, you’ll see an army of hardcore defenders proclaiming something along the lines of “my kids liked it” as a rebuff of the concept of criticism.
I’m not shocked to see a bunch of people vocally supporting Harold and the Purple Clown. Plenty of kids and their half-interested parents probably came away with a perfectly positive experience. It’s a bit tougher to know whether they remembered it the following afternoon, but the streaming market has pushed Harold to the top. It’s somewhat funny to see a film earn a mountain of praise from an audience that was evidently unwilling to leave their home to see it. The film is probably better off as a streaming offering anyway. You can’t sit on the floor and color in a coloring book in most theaters.
