I know that purportedly P.L. Travers was quite up in arms about the maladapted source material. But I love Mary Poppins.
On a recent discussion of top 4 favorite Disney movies, my list was:
- Lion King
- Mary Poppins
- Lilo and Stitch
- And this 4th one is highly variable but one of the following Pixar movies:
- Monsters Inc
- The Incredibles
- Inside Out
- Finding Nemo
- WALL-E
I will not be taking questions about my list.
But to return to Mary Poppins, director Robert Stevenson’s filmography is not perhaps a legendary one. It seems like if I were to use one word to sum it up, it’d be ‘dependable’. You know what you’re getting.
But Mary Poppins? What a swing.
Julie Andrews? Iconic.
Dick Van Dyke? He tried an accent, it was not good. But he’s so gosh darned likable that it doesn’t matter.
The music? Absolutely unforgettable earworms.
But perhaps my favorite element overall is the direction of the movie itself. There’s a pervading soft, dream-like quality to the whole experience. This feeling is brought about in a multitude of ways – the groundbreaking integration of live-action and animation, the soft color-palettes, the deliberately weird world-building.
For me as a kid, there was not a movie more emblematic of the power and joy of dreaming. Something Disney has mostly championed throughout its entire existence (They’ve been stuck in a creative rut for a hot minute now in my opinion, just literally ‘redoing’ the stuff they already did, but hey, the ‘live-action’ Lion King made a bajillion dollars)
10 out of 10. P.L. Travers is wrong.