Interview: Norton Virgien of ‘Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey!’

Posted on February 23, 2010 at 3:59 pm

Curious George and his friend, the Man in the Yellow Hat, have a new adventure in a straight-to-DVD feature-length movie, Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey, available on March 2. I got to talk to director Norton Virgien about what has kept the little monkey so popular for nearly seventy years and what it was like to (try to) direct Jerry Lewis.

What has kept Curious George so endearing to children over four generations?

We all love the characters because when you see something in the characters that you recognize in your family and friends, that makes an instant connection, doesn’t it?

I think children identify with his curiosity and get a kick out of his getting into trouble. And they like the way he is protected by the Man in the Yellow Hat.

Thinking about all the generations of families that have passed that book from parent to kid, it’s daunting. I would be very disappointed if we did something with an iconic character that people thought was off tone. Even though there was an earlier Curious George movie, we went back to the books and reread them all and noticed right away that the character was a little more mischief-prone and rambunctious than he was in the movie, were he was very very young. His curiosity was like a very little child seeing things for the first time. In our version, we let him grow up just a little bit and get a little closer in spirit to the character in the books. He thinks he’s at home in the world and knows his way around the city and that he’s pretty sharp. But we instantly find out that he still has a lot to learn. And that’s the spirit of the books. He’s one step back closer to that original character, which I’m proud of.

How do you direct Jerry Lewis? People have tried for decades and I don’t think anyone has ever succeeded!

We tailored the character to him. When we had the opportunity to work with him, we fond a part that was just the right spice in the middle of our story, when we needed to pick up the energy, and so he is this curmudgeonly character. Except for encouraging him to be his comedic self and let the Jerry Lewis persona come through, we sat back and enjoyed his performance. I wasn’t going to say to him, “Mr. Lewis, let’s revert to our childhood self.”

I think he’s already there!

He was so fun, though! And we got to travel to Las Vegas, which his where he lives.
The other legendary person we got to work with was Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. It was stunning for me as someone who grew up with that music, that he was excited about Curious George and wanted to do a song for us.

What did you tell him you were hoping for from the music?

I had a song I’d loved as a child called California Sun in mind for the moment when Curious George decides to go to California. It just fit that moment perfectly. Most people thought of that as a Beach Boys song. But it’s by the Rivieras. Somewhere along the line someone in our brain trust thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to get a Beach Boy to sing that song?” And Brian actually added a new melodic break in the middle and it was really fun to see him at work. If there’s one person who really understands California music, it’s Brian. He understood what we wanted better than we could have told him. But he was extremely engaging and friendly and wanted to know each of our favorite Beach Boys songs. A very sweet man!

And Matt Lauer is in the movie, playing a newscaster!

Matt was great. Matt plays Matt Lauer perfectly and was such a good sport about it.

And another of my favorites, Tim Curry is in the film.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with him on several projects. Animators look to the voice actors for inspiration and energy. He is such a high energy performer and so unabashed in pushing the part in whatever direction he needs to go that he pushes the animators too. His animation is among the most expressive which has a lot to do with Tim.

What did you do to keep the film consistent with the illustrations from the books?

The animators in the first movie really did a good job with their interpretation of the original art, the purity and sense of color and it added filmic treatment to give it depth. We took that as a wonderful starting point and built on that.

What age range to you try to appeal to?

The richest way to enjoy family entertainment is with the whole family. We want to make a movie that has a lot for parents and kids to laugh at together.

What inspires you?

What inspires me about doing family entertainment is the thought that each of these films we are doing will be the first movie someone falls in love with. Our audience is so open and available to us. If we put meaning and heart and fun into the film, we’re going to touch that fresh audience in a special way. That’s an honor and a responsibility and not to be taken lightly either.

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Behind the Scenes Directors

The Women At Disney Studios

Posted on February 13, 2010 at 8:00 am

Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue has an article by Patricia Zohn about the “ink and paint” women who worked on Disney’s classic animated films.

Much has been written about the prodigiously talented men who brought Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo to the screen. But if behind every good man stands a good woman, behind Walt Disney and his “boys”–the all-male assembly line–once stood 100. Walt was the impresario of a troop of young women, most under 25–a casting director’s dream of all-American acolytes–who made the screen light up, not with feathered swan dives or the perfect tip-tap of a patent-leather heel, but by making water shimmer or a tail wag just so. It was a job complicated by his unrelenting perfectionism–Jiminy Cricket required 27 different colors–but reducible to a simple imperative of the time: ever nimble but never showy, their job was to make what the men did look good.

She tells a related story in a great Huffington Post piece about another woman who worked behind the scenes — and later went on to appear in movie musicals.

I could not resist the opportunity to interview one other treasured behind-the-scenes woman, Marge Belcher Champion, famous as half of the dancing Champions of screen and stage, but known to Disney aficionados world wide as the real-live model for Snow White.

Champion was only 14 and still in school when she received $10 a day to act the part of Snow White for the Disney animators to use as their model. She later went on to partner with her husband Gower Champion in films like “Show Boat” and “Jupiter’s Darling.” But here she is helping the first Disney feature film come to life.

Computer-Generated Short

Posted on January 26, 2010 at 3:38 pm

I like the way this short film makes use of the latest technology (every bit of it is computer-animated with off-the-shelf software) and yet begins with some very old technology. But then, I love both computers and fountain pens.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

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Shorts

Up

Posted on November 10, 2009 at 8:00 am

Pixar movies are beautiful to look at, but what takes your breath away is the story. They don’t rely on fairy tales or best-selling books with pre-sold stories and characters we are already attached to. And, as if challenging themselves to make it even harder, they take on increasingly unlikely protagonists — a gourmet rat, an almost-wordless robot, and now a cranky old man, and somehow they make us fall in love with them.

In some ways, this is the oldest and most enduring of tales, the story of a journey. And this is one that started a long time ago. A brief prologue introduces us to Carl and Ellie, a boy and girl who dream of adventure. They pledge to follow their hero, explorer Charles Muntz, to see Paradise Falls in South America.

Then they grow up and get married and life intervenes. He sells balloons and she works with birds. They save for their trip but keep having to use the money for un-adventuresome expenses like repairing the roof. Then Ellie dies, and Carl (voice of Ed Asner) is left alone. Developers are closing in on his little house. He just can’t bear to lose anything more. And so he takes the one thing he has and the one thing he knows and ties so many balloons to his house that it lifts, yes, up into the sky, so he can follow Muntz to Paradise Falls at last.

But he does not realize he has an inadvertent stowaway. Russell (voice of Jordan Nagai), a pudgy, trusting, and irrepressibly cheerful little Wilderness Adventure scout who needs to assist an elderly person so that he can get a badge. They arrive in South America and as they pull the house, still aloft, toward Paradise Falls, they meet an exotic bird, talking dogs, and several kinds of danger, and have to rethink some of what they thought they knew and some of what they thought was most important to them.

The visuals are splendid, making subtle but powerful use of the 3D technology to make some scenes feel spacious and some claustrophobic. Carl and his world are all rectangles, Russell all curves. The Tabletop Mountains-inspired landscapes are stunning and the balloons are buoyant marvels, thousands of them, each moving separately but affecting all of the others, the shiny crayon dots of pure color amid the dusty rock and the earth tones of Carl’s wrinkles, gray hair, and old clothes. The other glowing colors on screen are the iridescent feathers of the bird, inspired by the monal pheasant.

There are a couple of logical and chronological inconsistencies that are distracting. But the dogs, with special collars that allow them to give voice to the canine purity of their feelings, are utterly charming — and there is a clever twist to keep the scariest one from being too scary. Another pleasure of the film comes from the way the precision of the graphic design is matched by some welcome and very human messiness in the story. Everything is not resolved too neatly but everything is resolved with a tenderness and spirit that is like helium for the heart.

Pixar Discovers Girls

Posted on November 7, 2009 at 8:04 am

Pixar is the most successful movie studio in history, with every one of its 10 films a critical and box office success. But not one of those ten films has featured a female lead. There have been memorable girls and women in films like “The Incredibles,” “Finding Nemo,” and “A Bug’s Life,” but the main action has gone to the male characters — in “Up” the only female other than the main character’s late wife, who never speaks, is a bird. That will change with two of Pixar’s upcoming releases, according to Willa Paskin on Slate sister site Double XX.

The first film, Newt, out in 2011, imagines “What happens when the last remaining male and female blue-footed newts on the planet are forced together by science to save the species, and they can’t stand each other?” This sounds like the animated version of It Happened One Night (plus a few action sequences), so, you know, sign me up. The second film, The Bear and The Bow, will be even more girlcentric, telling the tale of “the impetuous, tangle-haired Merida, though a daughter of royalty, would prefer to make her mark as a great archer.” It’s also set to come out 2011 and will be voiced by Reese Witherspoon.

Paskin wonders whether we really need another princess story, and I see her point. But I look forward to meeting these characters and to the reactions from girls — and their brothers — to seeing stories where girls get to take the lead.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture