Based on the beloved 1955 children’s picture book written and illustrated by Crockett Johnson, Columbia Pictures’ Harold and the Purple Crayon brings the childhood classic to life—and to movie theaters—for the first time. Directed by Carlos Saldanha, the family adventure story stars Zachary Levi as the former boy wonder in the blue onesie. The intrepid Harold is now all grown up and living his best day ever in the animated pages of his heliotrope-hued world.
As in Johnson’s original book, Harold’s universe is one of pure imagination, where his trusty purple crayon creates anything that Harold needs or imagines. When the narrator of Harold’s story suddenly goes silent, Harold decides to draw a door to the real world and leaves his storybook behind on a wild quest to find him. As Harold and the Purple Crayon arrives in theaters from Sony Pictures on August 2nd, Boxoffice Pro talks to star Zachary Levi about bringing Harold’s vivid imagination to the screen and how the magic of the movies binds us together.
As an actor, this film asks a lot of your imagination. How did you approach creating that magic on screen?
As an actor, whether it’s something where you literally have to be imagining things that aren’t there or imagining a life that you’re living, you still have to exercise that muscle of imagination and creativity. It’s just to what extent you have to exercise it. For something like this, I got to exercise it significantly more, because I’m not only pretending to be this character that I am not, but I’m also then drawing things out of thin air and having to imagine what they look like proportionally.
That was actually one of my favorite things about the movie, to be honest, because it was a challenge I had never been challenged with before. I’d worked with green screen before, I had imagined that there’s a big dragon coming after me and all of these various things, but I’d never had a magical utensil that makes things come to life simply by drawing them into existence–in three dimensions. That was a really fun dance with me and the visual effects supervisor. He would come over and be like, “So here’s how big the plane is.” [Laughs.] “ And here’s the propeller area.” And then I would just go and start drawing. It all came together really well. I was very impressed by it.
Were there certain things that you had to choreograph in order to get some of the dimensions right?
Oh yeah, definitely. With almost everything that we did, there was some level of choreography with it. Occasionally there were some wires. There were a couple of times where we had a wire-frame of something that I could trace, but then they had to take the wire-frame out. So it was just muscle memory at that point. Then there were other things where there was no wire-frame at all and so it was just me conceiving [things], in my own mind, in 3D space. What is this? How do I conceive of it?
Or seeing things that would later come to life, because I would draw things and then it would come to life. Like the skateboarding ramp—there’s a ramp that Benjamin goes up on and he rides a skateboard. I had to look at that and then just remember the proportions of it. Then I had to skate and move my crayon to the undulations of what I remembered that to be, and then it [came to life.] We were doing it on the fly, so it was very impressive to watch the finished product and see that it all cut together so well.
How does the film celebrate and continue Crockett Johnson’s legacy?
The original book, and the subsequent books that he wrote to supplement that story (all the other continued adventures of Harold and his friends), they all boil down to really fundamental things like embracing your imagination, embracing your creativity, embracing yourself, [and] believing in yourself. These are the core tenants. I think and I hope that’s what we’ve instilled most in the movie. Above and beyond anything else, that is what should be resonating, what the movie should be putting out there. I think based on the reactions that we’ve had already from audiences at the premiere screening yesterday, and even talking to my nephews that were there, they just lit up to that stuff. That’s what I think that our job was, and what we did, in making this live action version of it.
That theme of trusting yourself, believing in yourself, and finding your potential, feels like a good complement to your book Radical Love: Learning to Accept Yourself and Others.
Thank you. Having gone through my mental health journey, it’s a journey that I’m still on and will continue to be on. Because we all are on a mental health journey throughout our lives. It’s like our dental health journey. It’s never-ending; every day you’ve got to brush and floss your teeth. And every day you’ve got to brush and floss your mind and your heart. A huge part of that process of self-care is loving yourself, believing in yourself, and recognizing that you are doing the best that you can and that you are a product of your own environment, as is everyone else. It’s hard, because, though our parents did their best, a lot of times they left us with a lot of self-talk that isn’t the most healthy. That can lead to us not believing that we’re worthy of love, not believing that we’re worthy of believing in ourselves.
I think that’s certainly a correlation, to the extent that we’re trying to instill in this movie to believe in yourself and not let the bully, not let the doubter, tear down your innate worth–and therefore your imaginative and creative juices. Every day, practical self-care is waking up and, if there are lies that are flying around in your mind that are saying, “You’re not worthy, you’re not good enough. Nobody loves you, you’re alone,” that’s all the darkness; those are all lies. We’ve got to fight that every way that we can.
In a world full of distractions. Why is it important for families and kids to come together and see this story in theaters?
Because we’re all so distracted, sometimes it’s hard to then also say, “But go to this movie!” It feels like, “Isn’t that just another distraction?” But I would say that going to a film, particularly going to a theater, and watching it, not just as your family unit, but with other family units (people that you don’t know), what that does is create communal, societal trust: bonds. When you can all go to a theater and laugh together at the same things and you can cry together at the same things; what it shows you and what it tells you is that we’re not so different. We’re not so disparate. Even if you believe in this person on the political spectrum, and you believe in this person in the political spectrum, or we hold these different beliefs—whatever category of belief. At the end of the day, we must recognize that we are all one human race. And we do all feel very similarly about a lot of the same stuff. We’re all being told that we don’t. And that’s a great lie. I think that, ironically, going and having this communal experience in a movie theater, with your family and with other families, reminds you that we’re really not all that different.
I would also say that I believe distraction is a spectrum. There is bad distraction and there is some good distraction. We can’t just be in the seriousness all the time, we can’t just be in work mode all the time; we have got to play. This existence, this incredible miracle of life that we’re given, is in fact a state of play. I do believe that. I think Alan Watts said that very poignantly. It’s difficult to hold on to that, because there’s so much serious, gnarly stuff going on in the world. But we must come back to ultimately recognizing that we should be having a level of enjoyment in [life], because we think it’s this really long experience, but man, it goes by so fast. I think that when it comes to scripted films and television, even video games and music, things that are intentionally made—crafted by craftsmen, by artisans, by people that have true talents [who] bring those talents to bear (particularly with other people bringing their talents to bear), those culminate in what I believe to be good, better, healthier, distraction.
All of the things on the other side of the spectrum are bite-size, almost the fast food equivalent of content—which is just endless scrolling on TikTok and Instagram. And by the way, it’s something that I, even as a grown man, can struggle with sometimes. There’s so much information and you want to know it all. Everybody’s got a little FOMO. You’re like, “Well, what’s going on in the world? I’ve got to know!” The social media companies know this. The algorithms are there to trap you, to make you endlessly scroll through this stuff. And that is a bad distraction, because that is literally disconnecting us from ourselves and from each other. But again, to sit and watch a piece of art, a piece of entertainment, and to do that with other people, people that you know and people that you don’t, that is a good distraction.
Did you grow up going to the movie theater?
Oh, yeah, we loved going to the movie theater.
What were some of your bigger experiences or memories?
Oh gosh, so many. Growing up, me and my sisters were huge ‘Disnerds’, everything Disney. We had the Disney Channel when it first popped up, when cable literally didn’t know what they were doing. They were just like, “Well, just put anything on there.” It was all the Disney vault and we benefited from that. There were all these old cartoons that, unless you grew up in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, you never would have seen any of those. Because of cable TV and because they didn’t have any actual original programming, we got tons of that stuff.
Not only did we get to benefit from that through the television, but then [there was the Disney] Renaissance. The Alan Menken, [Michael] Eisner renaissance of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin—all of those movies. We were absolutely in theaters watching those. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade—that was pivotal in my life. I remember vividly going and seeing Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure with my buddies. We were all probably in fourth grade at the time or something, but it was so amazing. We loved it so much.
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