BY JOHN J. MILLER
Thursday, February 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
It was probably inevitable that someone would make a movie based on the Curious George books. Not only does the little monkey possess one of the great brand names in kid lit, but the second title in the series--"Curious George Takes a Job"--actually concludes in a theater, with George and his friends watching the premiere of a film about his life.
The image they see on the big screen--of George looking at a yellow hat that has been laid on the ground as a trap--won't make it into the movie that comes out on Feb. 10. This episode simply can't take place in exactly the same form as it does in the books. The original Curious George offends so many of the 21st century's delicate sensibilities that if it were written today, no major publisher would accept it without demanding big revisions. And so, in crucial respects, the forthcoming movie--if its trailer is any guide--is sure to take liberties with the classic books by the wife-and-husband team of Margret and H.A. Rey.
There's much to admire about Curious George, whose first volume appeared in 1941. The main character is animated by a fun-loving innocence that is perfectly pitched for an audience of children. The plot moves along briskly as George survives a series of spectacular misadventures on land, sea and air. The quality of the artwork is uneven, but the best illustrations in the series have achieved an iconic status: Pictures of George floating into the sky with a fistful of balloons or launching a fleet of paper boats onto a river are instantly memorable.
The text also resonates. At the Democratic convention in 1988, Sen. Ted Kennedy delivered a mocking criticism of then-Vice President Bush by borrowing a familiar line from "Curious George Takes a Job": "Where was George?" (The vice president shot back at the senator with a pretty good line of his own: He said he had been at home with his wife.)
In 25 years, the Reys wrote seven books about Curious George. It's amazing they didn't produce more, considering their great commercial success in the monkey business. According to Houghton-Mifflin, their publisher, world-wide sales have surpassed 30 million. (This figure includes several knockoff titles not written by the Reys.)
Margret insisted that the work was difficult. "Always we waited several years between books, until the pain was forgotten, like a mother in childbirth," she said. Interestingly, the Reys (he died in 1977, she in 1996) had no kids of their own--a trait they share with several other phenomenally successful children's authors, such as J.M. Barrie, Margaret Wise Brown, Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis and Dr. Seuss.
It may be that the Reys appreciated another problem: The quality of the Curious George books declined, especially after the first three. These later editions aren't failures, but they are increasingly earnest and overwritten, and the artwork often appears slapdash. George is still a good little monkey, but he isn't quite as curious. He is less the author of his own calamities than the subject of larger forces shaping his world.
Whatever the merits of the entire series, getting the first book into print was certainly an ordeal: In 1940, the Reys, who were German-born Jews living in Paris, fled on bikes as Hitler's army marched down the Champs-Elysees. They carried only a few items with them, including an early Curious George manuscript. (Their refugee travels, which ultimately took them to New York by way of Spain, Portugal and Brazil, are recounted in a picture book published last September: "The Journey That Saved Curious George," by Louise Borden.)
This year, Curious George turns 65--if he were human, he would qualify for full retirement benefits. But he's also very much a creature of his era. Consider how the first book violates our modern codes of political correctness. Rather than an eco-tourist, the Man in the Yellow Hat is a gun-toting poacher. When he first spots George, he says, "I would like to take him home with me." So he sets down his goofy hat as a lure. As George investigates, the man sneaks up from behind, pops him into a bag, and takes him home. Then George becomes Caliban with a twist: The man doesn't teach his simian sidekick how to curse, but he does show him how to drink booze and smoke a pipe.
There's something to be said for keeping liquor and tobacco products out of movies aimed at children, but the new film's whitewashing will go much further: The trailer makes clear that although the man still wears a yellow hat, he's also an unarmed naturalist. There's no snatch-and-grab, either. Instead, George mistakes the hat for a banana and follows the man across the ocean as a stowaway.
Perhaps these revisions are an acceptable bowdlerization. As dutiful liberals, the Reys might have played along willingly. (The Curious George Foundation, created by their estate's wealth, has given millions of dollars to everything from public television to the American Civil Liberties Union and the Sierra Club.)
But the challenges of adapting Curious George are in fact a bit more complex. Earnest literary types have interpreted the first book as a barely disguised slave narrative. Have you considered that the man's weird outfit could be a send-up of a colonial officer's uniform? Or that George is brown and lacks a tail? (Lots of monkeys are brown and most species have visible tails.) Or that he is abducted against his will from Africa and brought across the sea to a foreign land where he engages in high jinks when the master is away?
This interpretation--surely the subject of many half-baked teacher-college lectures--was not on the mind of the Reys as they fled from the Nazis. Perhaps it is helpful to remember something that Margret once said of her books: "I don't like messages. . . . These are just stories."
Except that this isn't really true. The final Curious George book actually authored by the Reys--"Curious George Goes to the Hospital"--was written to convince children that they needn't fear the patient ward. It's closer in spirit to a plainly therapeutic book such as "The Berenstain Bears Go to the Doctor" than the original tale in its own series.
Even earlier than that, however, the books displayed a form of social consciousness: In the 1942 British edition, Curious George was renamed Zozo. The publisher objected to the monkey's name because George VI sat on the throne and, in London slang, "curious" meant "gay."
Today's Hollywood probably would be more comfortable making the Man in the Yellow Hat an out-and-proud homosexual than an exploiter of the animal kingdom. Not that there's anything wrong with that, especially if producer Ron Howard and his crew deliver an entertaining movie. When it comes to children's books, however, the film industry's track record does not provide much confidence. For every movie such as "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"--an affectionately faithful adaptation of C.S. Lewis's book--there's a wretched disfiguration, such Mr. Howard's own 2000 version of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas."
Curious George is famous for making mischief. Filmmakers, for their part, must learn that sometimes it's best to leave well enough alone.
Mr. Miller writes for National Review and is the author, most recently, of "A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America."
