Director: Carlos Saldanha

Stars: Zachary Levi, Lil Rel Howery, Zooey Deschanel, Bejamin Bottani, Tanya Reynolds, Jemaine Clement

A strong whiff of déjà vu hangs over this brash cinematic sequel to Crockett Johnson’s 1955 illustrated book. A charming hand drawn intro, based on the book’s illustrations and narrated by Alfred Molina, shows how four-year-old how boy Harold, who lives with his two animal friends, Moose and Porcupine, was able to crayon his world into being. When the narrator, the ‘Old Man’, goes quiet, the now-grown Harold (Levi) draws a door into the real world. Cue a frantic pop-punk soundtrack as he and Moose, the latter now reverse anthropomorphized into human form (Howery) for some reason, arrive in our live action world to track down the Old Man. Porcupine, incarnated as a scatty British punkette, amusingly played by ‘Sex Education’s’ Tanya Reynolds, arrives a little later. While cycling on the highway Harold is knocked off his bike by stressed single mum Terry (a miscast, barely tuned-in Deschanel). Her young son Mel (Bottani) insists that they help Harold and Moose as that is what his late father would have done. Reluctantly Terry agrees and she lets the two stay in the attic room. But Harold’s anarchic crayon magic is soon causing problems. There’s a very derivative feel about this: Levi has played the wide-eyed gee whizz fish out of water character before in ‘Shazam!’ and the story of a single parent with a young child having their life changed by an injection of the fantastical is very redolent of ‘Enchanted’. It zips along amiably enough over an economic ninety-minute running time, and Jemaine Clement is good fun as Gary the Librarian, a frustrated fantasy author (‘for fourteen years plus’) who is in love with Terry and who knows of Harold’s fictional origins.

David Willoughby

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