Out of many child friendly cartoons that were made to instruct kids with life lessons, one of the more obscure ones that doesn’t get that much attention is Curious George. Based on a children’s book series made by Margaret and H. A. Rey, the stories of African monkey George living in the city with his human companion had various stories based around him during the middle of the 20th century, leading to his own TV show starting on PBS kids in 2006, which taught kids simple life lessons with pretty harmless colors and a overly cutesy sweet tone. While it seemed pretty babyish, the name was popular enough to stick around for all this time, even to the point that a movie was in production since 1992, finally coming out in 2006 simply titled ‘’Curious George’’. A young museum worker named Ted, also titled the Man with the Yellow Hat (voiced by Will Ferrell) is accidentally pushed into finding a lost giant monkey idol to keep his museum open. When he arrives and discovers an idol the size of a key chain, he mistakenly bumps into a monkey that he later calls George (voiced by Frank Welker). Following him back to the big city, Ted discovers that the entire city believes he has the actual sized idol and is preparing to show it off. Unable to think of a solution all the while George is getting into trouble, the two have to work together to get out of this situation with everything still standing. Even if the show has practically nothing for adults, the fact that this film got a lot of names and effort put behind it is a little striking, to the point where it manages to deliver something that, while very bare bones and leaving nothing really noteworthy moral wise, is surprisingly sweet, innocent and cute for kids who like the show to watch.

Curious George was never a property that had a heavy focus on story, it was much more focused on teaching lessons and showing off colorful images than any form of dramatic material which the show and books seemed to do service-ably. For a movie to be made about it, it needed to have a bit more than just a lot of cutesy imagery and this movie does give that extra hint to at least consider it a movie effort. The set up does seem pretty standard and predictable; local business is going to be shut down, a greedy bad guy is going to replace it with something less special, a duo is paired together, and hijinks ensue, it has all those tropes. Thankfully the movies atmosphere, tone and pacing make everything feel pretty calm, laid back and very charming; it’s a movie that isn’t hindered by its clichés, rather its simplicity feels like a natural step with what you could do with this idea. The situations that happen in the movie are pretty cute and endearing and even some of the cliched moments, which there are quite a few of, don’t last that long and aren’t that painful to sit through. The movie is maybe a hint too laid back in moment, whereby its conclusion it’s hard to picture if anything that important was changed or learned from this film, rather just a pretty cute waste of time. But in that regard, it has such a nice pleasant attitude and no wrong messages that it’s not hurting anything specifically.

The characters are around the same type of characters you would see on the wiggles or something meant for small kids; people that are made to be goofy and simplistic but also super-duper energized and easy to be around. While that attitude could come across as demeaning, it usually works if the show has a nice end goal in mind, and Curious George at least has that mindset. In honest opinion, George is not a very interesting focus; he’s an insert for babies and kids so the show can bounce lessons off of him and he can react how most of the kids would react to the situation. In this movie, this attitude does feel much like watching a baby for almost two hours and that can be a little tiresome at points, simply watching him interact with stuff on his lonesome isn’t that interesting. There’s an occasional cute bit like when a projector makes him appear giant in the city streets and the public thinks he’s Godzilla size, but aside from that, there’s not much to be taken from his solo moments. The real main focus, the yellow hat guy, is still pretty bland and safe, but a perfectly fine holder for the main focus and Will Ferrell as the voice is surprisingly spot on and he never gets annoying throughout the movie. Him and George have some cute moments and some of the side characters are pretty fun like the owner of the museum played by Dick Van Dyke, a crazy hotel owner and an incredibly vain art director. The voice actors for the film are pretty famous names, Will Ferrell, Drew Barrymore, Dick Van Dyke, Eugene Levy, David Cross, and all of them do a pretty solid job for a movie like this.

The animation is legitimately stunning. For a show that had a nice color palette and expressive character, but still a babyish level of art direction and structure, this film includes those elements (good and bad) and erupts them to new cinematic heights. It’s almost jaw dropping to see these gorgeous colors, fantastic character expression and even decent CG inclusion in a movie about a monkey and a human becoming best friends. The colors are so glowing and pronounced that they almost take over the film in moments with how bright and emphasized they are, it leads to some wonderful imagery popping with vibrance and lighting. The characters have very stand out designs that are drawn in incredibly book like manner and their expressions match perfectly with the way they are drawn, especially with George who has to communicate specifically through facial expressions. The CG doesn’t feel too poorly done either; the 3D environments are nicely shown and even work nicely into the simplistic designs and backgrounds, although the CG on a far-off person does look very polygonal. The movie had original songs made for it by artists Jack Johnson and most of them have decent melodies, simple lyrics and sound relatively nice but don’t entirely feel needed in this movie overall. The writing for this movie is one that feels all over the place; not so much in that the writing is necessarily bad or mixed in tone, the humor and dialogue is often very basic and straightforward, rather that it doesn’t really work on either level. It’s not very dramatic, it’s not always that funny and it’s too focused on a kid demographic to be that unique, which makes some sense as the writers for the film specially worked on action movies previously. It does still get a cute laugh every once and a while and even though its not a stand out writing job, it does get the job done and feels in spirit to the original book and show.

Even if the show has practically been forgotten by the public with no further mention of it since, Curious George has a surprisingly well-made film that even did well critically upon its release. The show and books have this charming simplicity that can be perceived as either cutesy and innocent or babyish and pandering, but no can overlook the pros that this film has to offer. With a good voice cast, fantastic animation especially for the premise, and some nice cute and funny moments every once and awhile, it’s a movie expressly made for kids but one that works decently well for kids as well. Its not to say that the film is technically great as it is still just largely a colorful waste of a couple hours with nothing truly meaningful gained by its end, but for a cute waste of time meant for little kids, its does it impressively well. The monkey business is no joke in this one, Curious George is curiously fun and wholesome enough to check it out.