It may be time for Zachary “goofy manchild” Levi to get a new agent

The simplicity and whimsy of Harold and the Purple Crayon has long mde the beloved classic a bedtime favourite, but turning such a cherished, though slight, tale into a feature film is a challenge fraught with difficulty Director Carlos Saldanha’s adaptation takes on the task with a fair amount of ambition and some flashes of inspiration, but unlike Harold’s magical drawings, not everything sketched out successfully comes to life.

Beginning in Harold’s animated world, things go awry when the Narrator (Alfred Molina) suddenly stops talking to Harold. Determined to find out what’s happened, the now grown Harold (Zachary Levi) draws himself a door to the real world and sets off with his pals Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds) on a quest to find the old man. Along the way, they encounter creatively stifled single mother Terry (Zooey Deschanel) and her son Mel (Benjamin Bottani) plus the local librarian Gary (Jermaine Clements), who nurses thwarted literary ambitions as well as an unrequited attraction to Terry.

Harold’s quest to find his creator in the real world makes sense as a jumping off point for an adaptation like this, but the problem is once it gets him to the real world, it struggles to find anything meaningful for him to do. The innocent fish-out-of-water comedy is mildly entertaining but deeply derivative not to mention repetitive and in trying to retain the source material’s simplicity feels disjointed and too lightweight on screen. There’s not a shred of ironic self-awareness in Harold And The Purple Crayon and its earnest sincerity in the story its trying to tell would be almost endearing were it not so bad at telling that story.

Littered with missed opportunities, the story presents us with three characters in the real world who each have their own struggles with imagination and creativity – Harold’s literal superpower – yet none of these are explored or resolved in a satisfying way. Instead, we get quite a bit of warmed-over Bean: A Disaster Movie slapstick schtick, while Levi, Howard and Reynolds mug their way through juvenile japes like they’re in a CBeebies show. There’s also the issue that for a movie that’s about a boy with a magical purple crayon, the magical purple crayon doesn’t get used nearly enough and when it does it’s frequently off-screen in a way that feels cheap rather than creative.

Harold and the Purple Crayon is a well-intentioned adaptation that knows it’s got something adorable but has no idea how to make that into a workable feature. Its lack of any kind of self-awareness means it lacks the substance to engage with a wider family audience and while five-year-olds might think it’s one of the best movies ever, older children and nostalgic adults are likely to feel underwhelmed and disenchanted. It’s not quite the trainwreck of The Polar Express but that’s only because it lacks the army of dead-eyed children staring into your cinematic soul.