Mary Poppins is Returning

So some of you may have heard (or if you haven’t heard yet, you’re about to) that Disney is making a live-action Mary Poppins sequel!  It’s called Mary Poppins Returns, and it will follow a grown-up Jane and Michael Banks and their children as they receive some help from a magical nanny.  As someone who enjoyed the original movie as a kid (and still enjoys watching it) this should be very exciting news.  However, I have some mixed feelings about how this movie will turn out.   

Mary Poppins and Bert in a parade at Disneyland.

There are a lot of things about this movie I am excited for.  First and foremost, the special effects should be interesting, to say the least.  When the original movie was made in the 1960’s Walt Disney used all of the tricks and effects he could to make it magical.  I’m intrigued to see what they can do with over fifty years’ worth of improved technology.  With modern computers, CGI, and other effects, I’m sure that there is a lot they are able to do that simply wasn’t possible for the first movie.  Even so, I hope that the new movie is just whimsical and magical as the original.  I mean, there’s just something about cartoon penguins and farm animals that isn’t the same with computer animation.

 

Another thing that should be fun to watch is the casting.  To be totally honest, I’m a little (maybe a lot) sad that Mary won’t be played by Julie Andrews because Julie Andrews is pretty much amazing in everything.  I don’t know much about Emily Blunt, who will be taking on the role.  Still, Andrews herself said that she thinks Blunt will be “practically perfect,” so I guess that should be good enough for me.  Equally exciting, Lin Manuel Miranda will be playing Jack, a lamplighter (I guess there’s no Bert in this sequel…), so those of us (myself included) who enjoyed Moana and Hamilton will get to see more of his work.  Speaking of Bert, Dick van Dyke will have a cameo in this movie, playing Mr. Dawes Jr., who runs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.  For reference, this was the bank where Mr. Banks (I’m feel like P.L. Travers must have done that on purpose) worked in the first movie, and Dick van Dyke, aside from being Bert, played Mr. Dawes Sr., so I feel like this cameo is a very appropriate reference to the first movie.  I haven’t heard if Julie Andrews will make an appearance as well, but I think that would be fun too.

The other main reservation I have about this movie relates to the circumstances surrounding the original movie.  P.L. Travers (who wrote the original Mary Poppins books) was incredibly reluctant to give Disney the rights to make the film, and ultimately, she was not particularly happy with the final product.  This is because Disney made some changes to the character of Mary (i.e., made her sweeter, nicer, and essentially more “Disney-fied”).  This is why none of her other books were made into movies, and why she was very hesitant to give Disney permission to adapt Mary Poppins into a Broadway musical.  So I am a bit concerned that this movie might be something that the character’s creator would not have wanted to be made.  Or maybe it’s a chance for Disney to fix the mistakes it made in the original.  We’ll have to wait and see.

So Mary Poppins Returns is shaping up to be an interesting movie.  I hope that it lives up to the legacy of the original movie.  As we hear more about it, I’ll be able to answer a lot of the questions I have, but until then “spit-spot”!