After 15 years of development hell that included a succession of writers and directors’ adaptations, Curious George finally lands in theaters. All images © 2006 Universal Studios. All rights reserved.

What Margaret and H.A. Rey predicted has finally come to pass: Curious George is a movie star.

Their 1947 effort Curious George Takes a Job ends with the monkey starring in his own life story, à la Audie Murphy or Muhammad Ali. In the newly released animated feature however, George of the storybooks is portrayed by a cartoon character, and a traditionally animated one at that. In a world of wall-to-wall CGI, George’s current job is not so much to resurrect 2D animation as to return a profit on Universal’s 15-year, eight-figure investment in bringing him to the big screen. The numerous scripts and visual concepts floated for the film over that time chart the evolution of Hollywood thinking when it comes to exploiting a classic children’s book character.

Beyond a few isolated shorts (including a pair of stop-motion adventures produced in 1982), George had never been animated as a feature. At the beginning of 1990s producer Jon Shapiro (Ri¢hie Ri¢h) was able to secure film rights from Margaret Rey, George’s co-creator with her late husband Hans (‘H.A.’). A succession of Hollywood luminaries took a whack at scripting the project, including William Goldman, a pre-Incredibles Brad Bird, Shrek’s Joe Stillman, and Daniel Gerson and Rob Baird from Monsters, Inc. Along the way George was adopted by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Ent. The little monkey now had some serious muscle backing him up.

Matthew O’Callaghan took over the directing reins of the troubled project a year and a half into production. His first impression of the script was that it lacked humor and charm.

It didn’t hurt either when Universal acquired the character from publisher Houghton Mifflin in 1997. The studio’s Consumer Products Group proceeded to transform George from a storybook character into “a brand” and “a global franchise,” driving its sales up 500% in the process. Now all they needed was a movie to really make things happen.

“Curious George has gone from all live-action with a computer-animated George [and prior to that, an actual-chimp George] to an all-CGI movie to what it is now, which is all 2D animation. This was all done before I joined the project,” according Matthew O’Callaghan, the director who came in to shepherd the film across the finish line.

O’Callaghan’s writing and directing credits include the TV series, Life with Louie and Mickey Mouse’s CGI debut Twice Upon a Christmas. Now, for his first theatrical feature he was taking charge of a troubled project a year and a half into production, with an equal amount of time left before a merchandising-dictated, do-or-die Feb. 10, 2006 premiere date. (Just in time for George to appear on 100 million Dole banana stickers as well as a U.S. postage stamp.)

“When I reviewed the film before I came aboard, it wasn’t funny, it lacked charm. It wasn’t simple enough for a child to understand.” He declined to name names or point fingers, simply saying, “Everybody was trying to do their best. There’s different circumstances, different people saying, ‘I don’t want to go in that direction.’ There’s always that sort of thing.”

The biggest challenge with adapting Curious George to film was how can a story that can be read in 15 minutes to be expanded to feature length? The solution was to give The Man In the Yellow Hat equal time.

The underlying problem that had to be addressed was one facing every producer bringing a picture book to the screen — how do you expand a story that can be read in 15 minutes to feature length? George’s book adventures follow a simple pattern: the little monkey’s curiosity gets him into trouble, at which point The Man in the Yellow Hat comes to his rescue and eventually all is forgiven.

The solution was to give the man under the hat equal time with George, a character arc and a name. The last part came first: the name “Ted” had popped up in an early draft and stuck. (Ironically, George goes nameless — only referred to as “monkey” — until halfway through the film.) The search for the perfect screenplay began, one that would capture the story of how George and Ted met and became friends. “It’s like a buddy comedy,” O’Callaghan explains, “Two characters who are opposites ultimately come together in the end.”