How ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’ Director Carlos Saldanha & VFX Team Found the Colors of Imagination

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‘When I read the script, I immediately connected with the promise of bringing imagination to life, which is the essence of my animation background.’

— Director Carlos Saldanha

 

 

A staple on any respectable nursery room bookshelf, Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon has electrified imaginations with the purity of its wonder since it was first published back in 1955. It’s a simple fantasy tale of a four-year-old boy named Harold whose drawing instrument magically brings to life whatever he has a mind to conjure up.

After a long and circuitous Hollywood development route over several decades that included pit stops on the creative road maps of animation legend Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) and music video maestro Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Her), a live-action hybrid adaptation directed by two-time Oscar nominee Carlos Saldanha (Ferdinand, Ice Age, Rio) has finally arrived this summer as an ideal family-style offering to beat the heat.

“When I started, it was an odd thing because we were at Blue Sky Studios for such a long time, and when that partnership with Disney didn’t happen, we found ourselves out of the loop in the animation world until this project came along,” Saldanha tells Animation Magazine. “It came to me the day after they closed the studios, and it was such a bittersweet moment because I was letting go 28 years of life with animation and embarking on a whole new adventure.”

Based on a screenplay from David Guion and Michael Handelman (Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb) and executive produced by Jeremy Stein and Jenny Hinkey with producer John Davis and Sony Pictures, Harold and the Purple Crayon depicts little Harold as a childlike adult and suddenly transports himself into the physical world. When that tool of imagination accidentally falls into the hands of a frustrated fantasy author, Harold and his friends tap into their creativity to rescue the world and restore order to both realities.

This colorful PG-rated adventure uses multiple styles of 2D animation before transitioning into a modern landscape for a series of lighthearted madcap escapades. It stars Zachary Levi as Harold, Lil Rel Howery, Zooey Deschanel, Benjamin Bottani, Jemaine Clement, Tanya Reynolds and Alfred Molina.

“When I read the script, I immediately connected with the promise of bringing imagination to life, which is the essence of my animation background,” recalls Saldanha. “I thought this would be a great project to combine those two skills, to be able to bring the thematics of the animation itself with a mixture of live action.”

VFX supervisor Matt Welford (Edge of Tomorrow, District 9) came on board Harold and the Purple Crayon to help deliver the special magic Saldanha envisioned. After a few productive early meetings, Welford was fully committed to the challenge.

“I’ve done a lot of various VFX films over the years, but it’s not very often that family-friendly films with huge VFX like this come across your desk, so when they do you look at them,” Welford says. “I have two young children at home and my wife is a teacher, so everyone in the family was very familiar with the books.”

In adapting Harold and the Purple Crayon for the big screen, there were several key elements to be respectful of while capturing the sheer joy that made Johnson’s source material so timeless.

“I read the books to my kids and I wanted to be able to convey a story where I would stick to the foundations of why I fell in love with the books in the first place,” Saldanha explains. “It’s about magic of imagination, the energy of this character and the message that comes across. Then we’re able to advance the story to a live-action world where this young character in the book becomes an adult. But it’s an adult that’s lived his whole life in the books. So it’s an adult with that level of innocence and creativity that’s not common in the real world.”

The Brazilian director says he loves that premise. “It’s about somebody more innocent and pure coming in to bring us back to that magic of believing in ourselves and how imagination can change your life,” he says. “I kept imagining if I had a purple crayon that it would be fun to do those things. But to make it happen in 3D, I had to use Matt’s brain to come up with a way to make it feel cool but, at the same time, contemporary and still be true to the book.”

Bent Image to the Rescue

Welford wore multiple hats on this ambitious undertaking and oversaw not only the dual styles of animation work in the film but also the fusion of live-action and CG visual effects.

“When I came aboard, they’d already been talking with various animation houses,” he adds. “I’d just recently come off of an independent feature called The Water Man and there was a lot of hand-drawn animation in that movie by a small boutique studio in Oregon called Bent Image Lab. They traditionally do commercial work, but they’ve dipped their toes into a few animation features. I was fortunate enough to work with them and brought them on to bid the work and introduced them to Carlos. They started doing a few early tests and designs for us and, through that process, ended up coming aboard as our vendor and our partner to put together what I think is some really interesting visual designs and hand-drawn 2D animation.”

Saldanha tried to keep the plain style of the original book for the first few minutes of the film, then show the progression from simplistic drawings into something that was still 2D animation but allowed for a little more three-dimensional elements in the process. Bent Image Lab was key in developing a animation style and visual language that shows the evolution of this pint-sized character from a precocious child into adulthood with the full flavor of the classic books.

Modulating actor Zachary Levi’s energetic performance required multiple preproduction conversations and on-camera takes to find a perfect balance of a naive man-child experiencing a far more dangerous realm than the comfortable sanctity of Harold’s familiar book pages.

“Zach was already attached to the project when I arrived. When we had our first conversations, he had a very clear idea of how he saw the Harold character of the book as an adult,” Saldanha says. “He was a fan of the book and wanted to bring that innocence, but at the same time bring the heart of this character. He stuck to the childlike principles but in an adult body. And that’s part of the lessons learned, too. In the book, he draws things and gets into trouble and then he draws himself out. Part of the lesson is that sometimes you can’t draw your way out of some things in this real world and that’s the sentiment that he carried through it.

“Everybody in the cast was a big fan of the story, and we wanted people that really loved the essence of that. In knowing my work as an animation director, they were key for my debut as a live-action director and they knew my style of comedy and sensibility. Even though at first glance, the movie is for kids, I bring in elements from the animation world where the subtlety of the comedy and the nuances of the live-action characters will please a lot of parents. You bring the nostalgia of the drawings, but you [also] bring the reality of their life stories. They all carry real emotion into the story, and I love the cast. Everybody embraced what we were going for, and at the end, I think the project was very unified by their acting and their passion.”

 

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Sony’s Harold and the Purple Crayon was released in theaters on August 2.