Filmmaker digs into lives of 'Curious George' creators

Ema Ryan Yamazaki, 27 and a graduate of New York University's film school, has spent the last two years working on a documentary about H.A. Rey and Margret Rey, the husband-and-wife team behind the multimillion-selling children's franchise.

Yamazaki, whose previous credits include directing a short documentary about an 800-year-old 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 cooperation.

The Adventures of George's Curious Creators, and will include original animation of the Reys themselves, and has begun a Kickstarter campaign to help with funding.

300 boxes (at the University of Southern Mississippi) 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.