Documentary Review - Monkey Business: The Adventures of Curious George's Creators

Available through the library on Beamafilm, this 82 minute documentary employs newsreel footage and photographs, combined with clever animation, to narrate the adventures of Hans and Margret Rey, the creators of Curious George.

This documentary tells just how the Curious George manuscript came to be published in the United States.The manuscript was one of few possessions that the German Jewish Reys took with them, on their bicycles, as they escaped Paris in June 1940, the day before German troops entered. Effectively, Curious George was an immigrant, like the Reys themselves.

Sam Waterston narrates the Reys' lives like chapters in a book, and thanks to apt animation by Jacob Kafka, the documentary has the look and feel of one of the Reys' books. Photographs of Hans and Margret Rey have animated images superimposed onto them, so that the Reys seem like their characters, such as Curious George and The Man with the Yellow Hat. The animated Reys are also superimposed onto newsreel footage, so that you can imagine them among the crowds escaping Paris.

Director Ema Ryan Yamazaki interviews several people who knew the Reys, including many who as children spent their summers in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, with the famous Reys. All interviewees attested to Hans' curious nature, charm, kindness, twinkling eyes and mischievousness. Hans was described as the sugar, and Margret as the spice. The now-adult children had found Margret protective of Hans and intimidating, and others who had known her reported her loud—and sometimes, brutally opinionated—directness.

Yamazaki relates the stories of Hans and Margret's childhoods in Hamburg, their difficult and separate lives on different continents in the 1920s and 30s, and how Margret was determined to change everything for them both by "rescuing" Hans from Rio. Yamazaki also dispels some myths about the couple, such as the story that Hans sold bathtubs up and down the Amazon River. It is clear that this was Hans' joke about his decade of boredom in Brazil, working in accounts for a bathroom fittings company.

Yamazaki uses archives, including old radio interviews and television footage, of the Reys, who saw themselves as "the parents of a curious little monkey, one who looked after his parents". They were quick to capitalise on Curious George as a "brand", one which has endured in movies, clothing and toys, but also still in the books the Reys wrote and illustrated.