Film to dig into lives of Curious George creators
NEW YORK — It takes an inquisitive mind and a steady spirit to get the whole story about the creators of Curious George.
Ema Ryan Yamazaki, 27 and a graduate of New York University’s film school, has spent the past two years working on a documentary about H.A. Rey and Margret Rey, the husband-andwife team behind the multimillion-selling children’s franchise. The Reys were Jewish refugees during the Second World War, fleeing from Paris in 1940 on homemade bicycles. Eventually settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they launched a series that has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. (H.A. Rey died in 1977; Margret Rey in 1996.)
Yamazaki, whose previous credits include directing a short documentary about an 800-yearold Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, and editing the HBO documentary Class Divide, had read Curious George in Japanese as a girl and was surprised to learn that no one had made a film about the Reys. Through a mutual friend, she got in touch with the literary estate and received its co-operation.
Yamazaki plans a 75-minute documentary with the working title Monkey Business: The Adventures of George’s Curious Creators, and will include original animation of the Reys, and has begun a Kickstarter campaign to help with funding. She talked with the Associated Press about the project. AP: What sorts of materials have you found? Yamazaki: There’s … 300 boxes of the Reys’ personal archives, anything from their wartime journals to letters they wrote to each other, the process of how they created Curious George — so the rough sketches all the way through to the fine prints, [and] all this other artwork they did that they never published. AP: What did you learn through your research? Yamazaki: I love how Margret describes the monkey as someone that finds himself in trouble and through his own ingenuity gets himself out of trouble. … It might have as well been describing them, especially in their escape. They literally found themselves, the night before [they had to leave], with no cars, no trains to be had, not even a bicycle. All they had was a tandem bike. It was Margaret who had no patience to ride a tandem bike to flee the Nazis. And she said: ‘Hans, my husband, do something about this.’ And he cobbled together two separate bicycles out of spare parts.