The filmmakers tried to stay true to the look of the book especially when it came to George, but a big-screen redesign of the monkey was impossible to avoid.

While traditional animation does a much better job of recreating George’s storybook world, everyone involved is holding their breath to see how well a 2D movie performs in today’s CGI world. O’Callaghan admits, “I am crossing fingers in a sense. I think we made right decision. My background is in traditional animation, so I was all for it.

“All that said, it depends how the world, what peoples’ expectations are when they go to the movies. Had we done a CGI movie, it would’ve been spectacular, but then the purists would go, ‘Wait a minute, where do they get off doing George in computer, he should be traditional animation.’ Now we’re seeing the opposite: ‘Why are they doing 2D animation? It’s dead, they should be doing George in CGI.’ Hopefully it’ll just be the characters that’ll draw people into the theater, but part of me hopes it does well so the other studios will say, ‘Hey wait a minute, traditional animation can succeed at the box office’.”

With only 18 months to turn George around, O’Callaghan turned to Ken Tsumura to oversee the complex task of coordinating the efforts of animation studios around the world. “I have some experience in putting outsource studios together,” Tsumura allows; with DreamWorks, Disney and The Simpsons credits to his name, he is an experienced hand at making different studios’ work look consistent and keeping production pipelines flowing smoothly.

“Everything through the workbook stage took place at our facility at Universal Studios in L.A.,” he explains. “Basically, creative control and design were all done in house. We also had a very small in-house animation team, five or six strong L.A. “A” talent people who worked for us at Universal. They handpicked key scenes, like closeups of George for example, and heavy acting moments. Everything else — rough layout and animation, cleanup, 2D effects and scanning — were done at satellite studios.

It fell to exec producer Ken Tsumura to coordinate the work of animation studios around the world for the film. Companies in California, Florida and Arizona, as well as Canada, France, Taiwan and South Korea contributed.

“Originally, before I started, the plan was just to use three sub-contractors: July Films in Simi Valley, California; Yowza Animation in Toronto and Project Firefly in Orlando. Then it became apparent we had to expand the studio considerably to get the show done in time.”

Tsumura “grabbed the few remaining die-hard 2D animation artists” in L.A. Fortunately for the project, the industry shift to CGI meant there were studios ready to take on the additional work around the world, and Tsumura readily lists them: “We used the Neomis Studio in Paris, they’re a spin-off of the Disney Paris group that worked on Tarzan and Lilo & Stitch. We gave some sequences to Fat Cat Animation in Phoenix, they’re an offshoot of the old Fox studio… July Films expanded considerably for our needs.

“We also used James Baxter Animation in Pasadena — a very, very world-class operation. He originally started at Disney, then to DreamWorks. He tried transitioning into 3D and said, ‘It’s not my cup of tea.’ He created his own studio to do commercials and other 2D work. In the far east, we used James Wong’s Cuckoo’s Nest studio in Taipei, Taiwan. Ink and paint was done at Toon City in Manila and Mercury Filmworks in Vancouver.

“Toward the end, we needed a little bit of extra resources in cleanup. So we sent a few scenes for cleanup only to Seoul, South Korea, and sent our head of cleanup there to supervise them. We basically put all our key people in location that was most important, where they could make the biggest impact.”

Tsumura estimates that the outsourced studios each did between 10 and 15% of George. Warner Bros. Animation in Sherman Oaks did the film’s compositing and created CGI animation for the movie’s city scenes, underscoring the fact that there is simply no such thing as a purely 2D film anymore. “Twenty percent of the movie takes place in 3D environments. They look like traditional animation backgrounds, but they move in 3D space.”