In the books, the man with the yellow hat fixed stuff. George, the little chimp he'd purloined from Africa, continually brought the world to the edge of chaos and catastrophe, and then the man fixed it. It was okay, and he went off with George in his yellow pocket.

In "Curious George" the animated movie, the man, voiced by the high-pitched, pipsqueaky pipes of Will Ferrell, is a complete goof. He's given a name -- Ted -- and a back story (he's a museum guide); his yellow suit is a measure not of his imperturbability and macho pride but of his gullibility, as he's swindled into buying it by sharpies.

He's not even capable enough to swipe George. In this version, their relationship has been rewired so that it's George who decides to go with him, not the other way around. And the plot involves poor, dim Ted being dispatched to Africa to come up with an "attraction" so fabulous it will save the clearly for-profit Bloomsberry Museum from extinction.

"Curious George" wisely plays up little George's classic attribute, his uninhibited, childish curiosity, as he gets into almost everything and faces few consequences. For a while George the icon, a little furry ball of adorable cuteness, is quite amusing.

It's the old kind of cartoon, or perhaps I should say it looks like the old kind of cartoon, drawn in the open, friendly style of H.A. Rey, the books' illustrator, nuanced simplicity at the approximate level of a fine New Yorker cartoon. Rey's wife, Margret, wrote the books, and she herself boasted a stylistic lightness of line -- the prose was supple, poetic, incisive.

That lightness is nowhere in this version, which was written by Ken Kaufman from a story by Kaufman and Mike Werb. It's pretty elementary.

-- Stephen Hunter

Contains no offensive imagery.