Harold and the Purple Crayon (Directed by Carlos Saldhana) is an excellent adaptation of the book–at least as excellent as we can possibly expect out of Hollywood in the 2020s.
The plot is, well, it’s complex. The “old man” has stopped speaking to Harold, who uses his crayon to draw a door into the real world to search for the old man, only to get into hijinks along the way, eventually getting disillusioned with himself and the darkness of the world and even losing his crayon to Jemaine Clement, who uses it for nefarious purposes. Through it all, Harold is reminded of the power of imagination and the need for a hopeful outlook on life. We can even throw in something about the nature of creation and the role of the artist in shaping the world (certainly as Christians we are going to hold to that!).
With that said, there’s a down side to Harold (that the movie doesn’t really work through–it is a kid’s movie after all). The “old man” has died, and the implication is that with his death Harold has lost his meaning. With advice from his friends, he realizes that his meaning is in himself (and his friends), and something something believe in himself and he can do anything. In other words, a perfectly normal contemporary film. With that said, the setting being that of a character from a book entering the real world, what we have is actually a fairly straightforward Nietzschean “death of God” narrative, where God has died and we have to flex our imaginative muscles and create meaning in the world for ourselves.
I don’t want to push this too far–it’s a children’s movie after all, and I doubt the screenwriters were holding The Gay Science in one hand while writing. Still, it’s something to talk to your kids about–the Artist did die once, but He came back to life. Because of that we don’t have to worry about the collapse of our world or the loss of our meaning. Instead we can engage the world with the same joy and wonder that Harold brings to this film.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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