The books usually introduce the Man with the Yellow Hat at the beginning. He says, 'Goodbye, George, I'm going to work.' He leaves, George gets into all his adventures, and the Man is absent until the end. My approach was to make it more of a buddy comedy.

We decided not to mess with that. Maybe he had an accident and lost his tail at some point.

We are delighted and will now continue our appeal to the European Commission for protection.

We sat in a room for a couple of weeks, we sort of took some elements from the existing structure and created new characters, simplified things, put our heads together and came up with what ultimately was the story of the film.