Popular storybook character Curious George has endeared himself to generations of children and adults alike. Now, the adventures of an animated Curious George are the highlight of a charming commercial for MasterCard out of McCann-Erickson, New York.
Meant to tout the client’s automatic bill payment feature, "Curious George" is a continuation of MasterCard’s "Priceless" campaign, and presents the beloved monkey in various scenes based upon the children’s book Curious George Takes a Job. With animation directed by Andrew Higgins of Picasso Pictures, London, the spot marks the first time Curious George—created 60 years ago by H.A. and Margaret Rey—has ever been fully animated.
The spot opens with George jumping out of a bus station over a turnstile, before hopping atop an ice cream cart and bouncing onto the roof of a moving bus. The voiceover says, "Commuting, every month … 82 dollars." The next scene shows George swinging from a trapeze over what appears to be a circus setting as the voiceover notes, "Health club, every month … 54 dollars."
A sequence of shots then shows Curious George swinging from a flagpole on the side of a building onto a window ledge, where he begins to clean the outside of a window with a squeegee. "Insurance, every month … 62 dollars."
Cut to a wide shot in which Curious George jumps from windowsill to windowsill, making his way up to the roof of the tall building. The scene then dissolves to a live-action, quiet rooftop garden shot (the live-action sequence was directed by Phillip Lihou of Frontier Pictures, London). There, a mother reads to her daughter from a Curious George storybook, as the voiceover says, "Trading a checkbook for a storybook … priceless."
The spot then returns to an animated setting, as we see Curious George holding two paintbrushes, painting the words "The End" on a wall with red and yellow paint as the voiceover says, "Use MasterCard instead of checks to pay monthly bills automatically." The spot ends with the tag, "There are some things that money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard." In the final sequence, Curious George accidentally knocks over two cans of red and yellow paint, whose contents spill out to form the red and yellow MasterCard logo. Supered copy also directs people to www.mastercard.com for more information.
The spot’s agency creative team consisted of creative director Joyce King Thomas; art director John Pearson; copywriter Amelia Rosner and producer Kelley Long (no one from the McCann team was available for comment at press time).
Larry Flanagan, senior VP, North American marketing at MasterCard International, said that the spot was created as the main vehicle to inform consumers about automatic bill payment. "We wanted to do it through a ‘Priceless’ commercial," said Flanagan. "As we did research with consumers, we found paying bills at the end of the month is not one of their most favorite things to do. … One of the things they talked about was being able to spend more time with their family on weekends. The whole idea of replacing a checkbook with a storybook really was the key driver for the creative."
From there, it became a matter of finding a storybook character. Flanagan said that McCann-Erickson did a thorough review and came upon Curious George. Related Flanagan, "He was perfect because he’s widely known; and he’s known as being a character that gets out of trouble easily, which was an image we wanted to communicate with the whole notion of automatic bill payment. Lastly, he’s not overexposed; this is the first time he’s been used in a national television commercial."
Curious George is licensed by Universal Studios Consumer Products Group, which provided Picasso a style guide—a Curious George bible of sorts—which showed the character in "every conceivable position, and [different] situations and environments, doing everything that he might do," said Jane Bolton, executive producer at Picasso Pictures.
Using this guide, along with a 3-D Curious George model as reference, Higgins first did a number of color key frames of the character in scenes from the spot. "We tried to keep the look of the artwork very similar to the illustrative hand-drawn style of the books," said Higgins, who believes McCann tapped him because of his own style of loose drawings featuring minimal color and line.
After the agency approved an animatic, Picasso set out to do the actual animation. Three animators, including Higgins, spent the first few days familiarizing themselves with the character by drawing him in numerous positions. "We drew George and all the other characters and elements on separate pieces of paper so that they could be composited together in the computer." The simplest scene consisted of six layers, said Higgins, while the most complicated one—the bus-jumping sequence—had around 35 layers.
The biggest challenge, according to Higgins, was to achieve the look of the storybook illustrations. "It was to combine hand-drawn elements with computers and digital color, and we achieved that," said Higgins, who added that another key task was to create movement appropriate to George’s nature. "We came up with what we think is the right way of moving George around, which is to say he was very springy, and very quick-witted."
