Bell’s ‘Purple’ focuses on unity

Instead of focusing on the political divide between red and blue, Kristen Bell wants everyone to start seeing purple.

So Bell, and close friend Benjamin Hart penned a children’s book, “The World Needs More Purple People,” out Tuesday.

In the book, readers follow a child, Penny Purple, on her quest to learn what exactly a purple person is and how she can become one.

Why write a children’s book instead of one for adults? “There’s a high probability that if a child is reading this book, a parent is either near or reading it to them,” Bell told USA TODAY.

Bell knows how to appeal to both adults and children. After all, in addition to her recent work on the television series “The Good Place” and her upcoming voice work on new animated series “Central Park,” Bell played the fearless and fan-favorite Anna in Disney’s animated hits “Frozen” and “Frozen II.”

Bell and Hart started writing the book about two years ago, but Bell says now is really the perfect time for its release. “Right now we are all experiencing something together, which is this global pandemic. We have commonality.”

The idea of writing this book came a few years back during a dinner with Hart. “We were just lamenting on the fact that adults spend a lot of time arguing,” says Bell. “It occurred to us that our children are running around us, absorbing everything we talked about. And we were all talking about divisiveness.”

But while the debate at the dinner was among a group of friends, Bell and Hart still thought there was a problem. This led them to ask a very simple question. When do children hear adults talking about sameness, togetherness and seeing people as friends rather than enemies? They decided, not enough.

“We wanted to create a road map for kids to first look for sameness,” said Bell. “The reason you’re able to have a healthy debate with someone and perhaps have their eyes opened on a new topic is because you first see sameness. And we are living in a world that sees differences first. We wanted to change that.”

But how did they come up with purple people?

“We needed a label,” Bell says. “But a label is tricky in and of itself because a label means certain people are included and certain people are excluded.“After much deliberation, they settled the color purple as a good descriptor.

It’s no accident that red and blue, the colors used to represent the U.S.’s two major political parties, make purple. Says Bell, “Don’t think I’m not sending this to everyone in our ... government and probably every government around the world as required reading.”

Purple people, according to Bell, are people who ask really great questions, who are really silly, who use their voice, who work hard and are happy and confident to be themselves.

Bell did test the book out on her children (Lincoln, 7, and Delta, 5) while writing it. “I had kids so that I could have an at-home science experiment,” jokes Bell. “Honest to God, they’re a great group to test on. They are little guinea pigs, but I will say my kids could care less that I was writing a children’s book.” That is until artist Daniel Wiseman came on board to draw the illustrations.

Bell wasn’t offended because “for children, visual learning is really important. And I think that is why my kids latched on and saw so much more when they saw it through his illustrations.”