An average movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick, in fact, to be honest, I actually wonder how it did end up in my queue. I think it was because Zooey Deschanel was involved (by the way, she obviously had some plastic surgery done on her mouth and I’m afraid it didn’t really work out for her after all). I have to admit that I’m not familiar with the classic children’s book it was based on but the approach they took was obviously really misguided. Indeed, pretty much like with ‘Peter Rabbit’, they took a beloved quaint children book and gave it a modern twist but the end-result was just so lame. The only thing remaining was this purple crayon capable of creating anything, everything else from the book, even Harold, who was originally a toddler, was suddenly replaced by Zachary Levi, a B actor in his 40’s which sounds as underwhelming as it was. Of course, it should have been fully animated and how cool it would have been if they had remained more faithful to the source material? On the other hand, they might still have been some issue with this format as I’m not sure that you can really deliver a satisfying 90 mins plot about a toddler and his magic crayon. For Carlos Saldanha, following the footsteps of Brad Bird or Andrew Stanton, it was his first live-action feature film and, well, while it seemed that this combination of live-action and animation was a good fit for him, this first effort was hardly convincing, I’m afraid. You might also wonder who was the target audience for this movie. Indeed, the book is for very young kids but this movie is way too intricate and probably too violent for them. However, I can’t imagine children above 12 years old not being bored by this either. Anyway, to conclude, even though it was rather harmless, it was above all really boring and I don’t think it is really worth a look. 

5/10