For Jo’s IndieWeb Movie Club of June 2025, I watched 2 movies. Mary Poppins and Saving Mr. Banks. I find myself not sure how I feel, or rather having too many feelings about each to really narrow down my feelings to a pithy recommendation about the films. I feel like I could write an essay, or at least ramble extemporaneously, for 30 minutes without stopping on the ideas in each work. Fictional, metafictional, the role of childhood, and parents for creators of art meant to be enjoyed by children, that art can be a kind of therapy–to right the wrongs visited upon us in childhood. It’s all just too much.

So what to write? I will include some observations from my notes watching each film. And even though I have a stronger recommendation for the story behind the story, both films have my recommendation.

Mary Poppins (1964)

• the music is delightful
• the eye-lines between humans and animated characters in the animated parts don’t quite work (it would be years before we got that right in film, with Roger Rabbit)
• the penguins are undoubtedly great
• in the song about Dick Van Dyke’s character there’s a sequence of lines that are meant to be a compliment to his character Bert, but also somewhat indict men, because most men ladies ought to fear, presumably:
  • You’d never think of pressing
    Your advantage
    Forbearance is the hallmark of your creed
    A lady needn’t fear when you are near
• Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins is indeed a delight, meant to be somewhat stern but unfailingly positive, caring, witty, kind
• Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is quite good, as is Spoonful of Sugar
• I didn’t grow up watching this film. When it would show up on television (I grew up mostly post-VCR) it’s not one my family sought out
• When I did watch it as a kid I did not understand it. I didn’t understand the jumps between “real life” and the “creative fantasy” and the “magic realism” of Poppins flying in on an umbrella. Even as a child I had to have some sense of why things were happening, and pure fantasy like this interleaved with realism confused me. I had the same problem with Willy Wonka at that age. It was scary to me because I could not reconcile the real with the fantastic. I needed clearer boundary between, as in The Wizard of Oz, where Kansas is Real, and Oz is Fantastic, and they do not overlap.
• I have an easier time with such fantasy now. Things like, say, Birdman or Naked Lunch or Pee Wee’s Big Adventure can shift in tone and meaning and I can “read” the film better.
• I enjoyed it, but on re-watch I definitely felt for my young self, confused by the film. I remember my parents taking care to explain movies to me, that they were “not real,” and “it is just a story.” I suspect what they saw in me as parents was terror and confusion, and they were comforting me. It seems of course ridiculous for a child to need reminding that the terrible forest fire Bambi is not real, but I was apparently a kid who needed that. Poppins wasn’t that, exactly, but it’s part of a spectrum of unreality that I had a hard time processing.

Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

• This movie is not documentary, but it is about the point at which P.L. Travers meets with Walt Disney and his team in Burbank to sort out whether Disney will actually get to buy the rights to make Mary Poppins
• It is certainly fictionalized, but it has elements of truth about it
• The Sherman Brothers are eternal geniuses, and it’s a treat to see them here, there’s a documentary about them: The Boys: The Sherman Brothers Story
• Why Disney would put up Travers at the Beverly Hills Hotel when the work were at the studios over the hill in Burbank still strikes me odd, but also, the Beverly Hills Hotel really is nice. And it is only 12 miles, really.
• Travers is so stern she seems impossible as a character, and her arc from resisting the adaptation and despising and dismissing Californian frippery is cartoonish, but her tone is borne out during the credits, as she critiques the work Disney’s teams do
• It’s set in 1961, and Poppins was released in 1964 — animation then and now takes a long time
• Tom Hanks is pitch perfect as Walt Disney
• Disney died in 1966 of cancer and for me that looms large over this narrative, that’s just 5 years away in the film’s timeline, and the release of Poppins is August 1964. Lung cancer diagnosis would be November 1966, and he’s dead a month later. It is better to live today than then.
• Until about a decade ago I’d have told you that Walt Disney was alive when I was a child. We watched his introductions on The Wonderful World of Disney on tv until the late 1970s. I had the impression he died in maybe 1978. It’s a very strange feeling to think I had such a poor sense of the man’s actual life. Truly Disney made of himself a myth. A myth based in reality but a mythic figure even now
• The scene, very small, of Travers barging in on Disney smoking, which he hid assiduously, and his expression of shame over the smoking hits me hard every time I see it
• Scenes of creative conflict I love, scenes of characters coming to reevaluate their own creations, that kind of metatext, are absolutely catnip for me
• There’s a bit where Disney invites Travers to visit Disneyland, and she goes, and lets loose, somewhat, and I buy it. It’s almost too pat, and like I said, it’s a movie, so there’s bound to have been some collapsing of the narrative to tell the story of Walt “selling” Travers that he will do right by her creation, but I buy it every time I watch the film.

If you get a chance to watch both films in the same short span, I recommend it.

Trailer for Saving Mr. Banks