Zachary Levi brings imagination and mayhem to life in the Harold and the Purple Crayon trailer

Zachary Levi goes full-on Green Lantern using the power of imagination in Sony’s Harold and the Purple Crayon trailer!

The limits of imagination run wild in Sony Pictures’ trailer for Harold and the Purple Crayon, starring Zachary Levi as the keeper of a magical crayon able to bring any drawing to life! Based on the beloved children’s book written and illustrated by Crockett Johnson, the family-friendly adventure finds Levi starring as a grown-up Harold who rediscovers the power to manifest objects like a preschool Green Lantern.

Johnson’s classic novel, Harold and the Purple Crayon, is about a curious four-year-old boy with a magic purple crayon that has the power to make anything he draws become real. Hollywood has been attempting to bring the story to the big screen for decades, and it seems time has finally arrived. The new film, directed by Carlos Saldanha (Ferdinand, Rio, Robots), presents a new spin on the story, with Zachary Levi playing a grown-up Harold who escapes from the book into the real world alongside two of his friends, played by Lil Rey Howery and Tanya Reynolds.

In the Harold and the Purple Crayon trailer, Levi’s Harold arrives in the real world with his magical crayon ready to cast a spell on reality. After befriending a young boy, Harold uses the crayon to introduce otherworldly magic to create powerful objects, creatures, and unruly modes of transportation. While I get hokey vibes from the trailer, I love how the film represents the crayon’s magic.

Zooey Deschanel, Jemaine Clement, Camile Guaty, Ravi Patel, and Hillary Harley join Levi, Howery, and Reynolds as primary cast members in Harold and the Purple Crayon.

As I mentioned before, Hollywood has been attempting to bring the story to the big screen for quite some time, going back to 1992 when Where the Wild Things Are writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak acquired the rights. The Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick was attached to direct but ultimately departed to helm James and the Giant Peach. Spike Jonze then boarded the project to develop it as a live-action/animated hybrid, but he left as well. The project transformed into a CGI-animated movie almost fifteen years ago but couldn’t get off the ground. However, we did get a short-lived animated series nearly twenty-five years ago narrated by Sharon Stone for HBO Family.

What do you think about today’s Harold and the Purple Crayon trailer? Do you like the new story approach, or should they have kept the original plot? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

About the Author

Born and raised in New York, then immigrated to Canada, Steve Seigh has been a JoBlo.com editor, columnist, and critic since 2012. He started with Ink & Pixel, a column celebrating the magic and evolution of animation, before launching the companion YouTube series Animation Movies Revisited. He’s also the host of the Talking Comics Podcast, a personality-driven audio show focusing on comic books, film, music, and more. You’ll rarely catch him without headphones on his head and pancakes on his breath.