The Weekend Watch: Harold and the Purple Crayon and Other Harold Stories

Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!

Even before Zachary Levi outed himself as a real anti-vax libertarian wacko, he was kind of an annoying presence. Now, after Shazam! and its much worse sequel, he’s getting typecast as man-children more literal than those usually described as such. No longer playing a kid able to access a jacked super-adult’s body, in Harold and the Purple Crayon, he’s starring as the grown-up version of the children’s book scribbler (for god knows what reason). In order to avoid all things Levi and to focus more on the creative potential of the imagination-centric subject matter, this Weekend Watch will focus on early animated adaptations of this work. If you want to be particular, we can say that it’s Harold and the Purple Crayon and Other Harold Stories, which packaged together three short films: 1959’s Harold and the Purple Crayon, 1971’s A Picture for Harold’s Room and 1974’s Harold’s Fairy Tale. These shorts are available to stream free at the links above.

All three films come from the original author of the children’s book, Crockett Johnson, with the first helmed by David Piel (probably not the same guy who later appeared in Killer Klowns from Outer Space, but I can’t confirm that) and the latter two by the Oscar-winning Gene Deitch. Deitch was a longtime United Productions of America (UPA) animator, working on all sorts of productions for the company (formed in the wake of the famous 1941 Disney strike) and embracing their house style. This style veered away from realism and detail, favoring abstraction and minimalist modernism. In the middle of a career spanning scrapped Hobbit adaptations, Popeye, Tom & Jerry and more, Deitch dedicated some time to tackling storybooks.

I’ve always been partial to UPA’s animation, and it’s a perfect fit for Harold. As Crockett Johnson apparently told Deitch, “Never overlook the art of the seemingly simple.” This is the guiding principle of good children’s books and UPA cartoons alike, and these cute short films find all the magic inherent in the humble line. Before we get to Deitch’s work, we should look at the story’s first leap to animation. Narrator Norman Rose walks us through Harold’s self-made world, the story becoming an even younger-skewing version of Duck Amuck’s fourth-wall break. Harold is both animation and animator, dreamer and dream. It’s a lovely, empowering sentiment used for more earnest ends than in the famous Looney Tunes entry that makes this more nightmarish and existential. Rose is perhaps the best part of the whole short, his baritone getting more and more manic as Harold himself panics. Perhaps the second-best part is that Harold is credited with “Lighting and Scenery.”

Over a decade later, the pair of Deitch films still carried this thematic torch. The animation is a bit more sophisticated, and the background has a little more papery texture, to better sell the point that Harold is drawing his universe into life. Harold gets a bit more personality this time around, making more evocative faces without fully distracting from the straightforward conceit at this series’ heart. Playing with perspective with an even more flexible and rubbery sense of physics, A Picture for Harold’s Room is lovingly focused on the act of drawing and artistry. You can imagine children laughing along to Harold and the Purple Crayon, but A Picture for Harold’s Room feels likely to goad kids into trying out some of the techniques they saw in their own doodles.

Harold’s Fairy Tale, with its jazzy score (from Czech legend Karel Velebný!) and silly-logic narrative, is both the most complex to follow and laid-back to watch. Giant invisible witches fought off by mosquitoes? Which need to be driven off with smoke, which requires a fire…and then rain? The series of drawings get into If You Give a Mouse a Cookie territory in a cheerfully absurd way, and tumble freely from the tip of Harold’s crayon. It’s got the flow of an improvised sax solo.

Taken together as Harold and the Purple Crayon and Other Harold Stories, these films highlight the most important element about Harold and the Purple Crayon: creative freedom. These are limitless movies, only constrained by the creator at their center. Where his crayon goes, the world follows. Where his mind connects loose lines into shapes, beings, ideas—that’s what the story clings to. They’re breezy watches, loose and inviting. But they’re also one of the most exciting things a piece of children’s media can be: inspirational.

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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