Saving Mr. Banks

[Doppleganger]

Starring Tom Hanks...just looking at the title and some pictures of how Hanks was dressed, I figured it was something along the lines of "Mr. Deeds" and whatnot. But I'm familiar with this legend, so you can imagine how my eyes peeled like onions as the trailer went on.

[Talon87]

Interesting ... but I feel like the trailer told me the entire story save for the conclusion. Like, introduction, rising action, and climax, all there. It doesn't really seem like a movie that's worth sitting down to watch for an hour and forty-five minutes. Hell, I'm not even sure it could justify breaking an hour. But who knows, who knows.

Didn't realize that the making of the Mary Poppins film was so controversial between Travers and Disney though.

Mary Poppins is, of course, one of the best films Disney's ever made. It's definitely one of those films that you appreciate 10x more as a teenager or older, once you're old enough to appreciate how Mr. Banks is the real focus of the film, not Poppins and her magic and certainly not the children. Tomlinson's performance makes this movie. It's really a shame that he wasn't used by Disney more often. I always did love Bedknobs and Broomsticks too, though Mary Poppins was without a doubt his superior performance.

[Doppleganger]

I definitely feel like they spoiled too much with the trailer (and heck, the title), but there is room for elaboration if you know how Mary Poppins ended up.

-Wikipedia suggests that Travers used her own father as a model for Banks, while Disney used his own relationship with his father to relate to her. This is contrary to what we see in the trailer where Disney seems surprised that the subject of the book is Mr. Banks and not the Banks children.
-Disney himself was a Hollywood showman, and while he tried to project a clean image for all audiences, he wasn't as pure as his productions. Far from a devil, but not a saint, either. He was a magician who also knew black magic.
-The final production of Mary Poppins reduces the relationship of Mary Poppins and George Banks to little more than subtle references, and Travers hated the final product. So the film (and Wikipedia's) insinuation that Disney/Travers set aside their differences leading to the creation of Disney's greatest film is not a proper insinuation.

I loved seeing the young Sherman brothers, especially since one of them died fairly recently, and I'm especially curious as to what's going in their heads with all those dandy words for their songs.

[Shuckle]

Wow, I didn't realize that Mary Poppins had Walt Disney himself behind it.

...Oh man. I somehow managed to think Bambi was released in 1902 instead of 1942. That would do it.

Julie Andrews~

I'm a little disappointed to see this movie not being factual, although I'm willing to bet that they will do the various personalities fairly well. I don't think I'll see it though.

[Doppleganger]

What's not factual about it? We don't really know the ultimate direction the film's going to go yet, but the basic premise isn't total fictional embellishment.

[Loki]

Since when has a movie been 100% factual? Even documentaries bend the truth.

[Doppleganger]

Originally Posted by Loki

Since when has a movie been 100% factual? Even documentaries bend the truth.

A few years ago, there was a controversy where David Attenborough produced a documentary with the BBC that showed a polar bear birth, and the narration said it was in the Arctic, but it actually took place in a zoo. And people flipped the fudge out at being "lied" to in the documentary.

Attenborough basically told them to stfu, because invading an actual polar bear den in the wild would have harmed the animals or put stress on them, it was difficult, impractical and expensive. Documentaries are fundamentally narratives with footage to support it, and narratives rarely have to stick to some promise of absolute truth.

[Amras.MG]

This thread is literally the first time I have ever heard Mary Poppins be called Walt Disney's greatest film.

[Mercutio]

Hmm, I've not seen it in a few years now but I'd dispute the assertion that the film is about Mr Banks being saved. I can imagine how it's intended to be like that, particularly given the second half of the film, but it's very much not the intended focus to me.

And greatest? Meh, if you like. It's a good flick.

[Doppleganger]

I don't think there was a title released during Disney's lifetime that had the same financial or critical success of Mary Poppins. All of what we think of as Disney's best work like Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi were financial disappointments, and most of the really crazy successful stories came in the renaissance era almost 30 years after Disney died.

[Talon87]

I'm with Doppel. While I don't personally think it's Walt Disney Studios' #1 best film, I do think it's one of their all-time best, and it's an easy contender for first place out of the films made during his lifetime. (Not saying it's a definite winner of that coveted spot. Just that you'd have to be crazy not to put it in the running along with Pinocchio and The Jungle Book and such.) Whether you personally loved the film or hated it, something which you critics will be forced to reconcile with is the fact that Mary Poppins was the first (and, until the Disney Renaissance, the only?) film to win so many Academy Awards. Most Disney films made during Walt Disney's lifetime didn't even manage a nomination. The few that did might have gotten one or two nominations at best but that was it. But Mary Poppins ...

Julie Andrews won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Mary Poppins and the film also won Oscars for Best Film Editing, Original Music Score, Best Song for "Chim Chim Cher-ee" and Best Visual Effects, and received a total of 13 nominations, an unsurpassed record for any other film released by the Walt Disney Studios.

Granted, the Academy was probably a lot kinder towards an actress whose presence on screen was not hidden behind a cartoon mask than towards all who came before her who were, but for newbie Julie Andrews to outmaneuver veteran Audrey Hepburn for the coveted Best Actress award says something as to the performance she delivered. Consider by contrast Snow White:

At the 11th Academy Awards, Walt Disney was awarded an honorary Oscar, and the film was nominated for Best Musical Score. It was added to the United States National Film Registry in 1989 and is ranked in the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films, who also named the film as the greatest American animated film of all time in 2008.

Pinocchio:

Pinocchio won two Academy Awards, one for Best Original Score and one for Best Original Song for the song "When You Wish upon a Star".

Cinderella:

The film received three Academy Award nominations for Best Sound (C. O. Slyfield), Original Music Score and Best Song for "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo".

The Jungle Book (released within one year of Walt Disney's death):

The song "The Bare Necessities" was nominated for Best Song at the 40th Academy Awards, losing to "Talk to the Animals" from Doctor Dolittle. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Gregory Peck lobbied extensively for this film to be nominated for Best Picture, but was unsuccessful. It was not until 1991 when Disney's Beauty and the Beast that an animated film would be nominated for Best Picture.

Again, while there's no denying the Academy's bias against animated pictures throughout most of the 20th Century, I think there can be little denying that Mary Poppins with its thirteen nominations and multiple wins including Best Actress and Best Original Musical Score was a tour de force triumph of Walt Disney Studios.

And besides: it's a good film.

[Amras.MG]

Never said it was a bad film, just didn't realize people had such a high opinion of it.

Also the Academy Awards are pretty iffy on what they do and don't nominate and give awards to, mainly due to their intensely political and interpersonal nature.

Pokemon 2001 wasn't nominated for Best Picture. I rest my case.

[Talon87]

I definitely agree about Academy politics and unreliability; but I'd also say thirteen nominations, Amras, come on.

[Talon87]

A six-page account by The New Yorker. A bit of a long read for the short attention spans of your modern Internet reader, perhaps, but well worth it if you're interested in the subject matter and want a version which won't ask you for two hours of your time as the Disney film likely will.

Basically, it just sounds like one of those unfortunate no-win situations where an author who shouldn't have sold the rights to any aspect of her property -- because the work is far too precious to her to allow anyone else to modify or adapt it -- did sell them. The moment she agreed to Disney's request for permission to produce the film, the two entered into waters where it was impossible for both to happily emerge safe and sound. Travers (perhaps sympathizably) was far too much of a control freak, it sounds like, while Walt Disney Studios, for their part, were far too unsympathetic to a spinster's demands for a book-faithful adaptation.

I mean, seriously though. Did she not see Snow White, Pinocchio, or Cinderella? Was she not aware of how Walt Disney Studios conducted business? That they would take preexisting stories and adapt them rather loosely, not rigidly faithfully?

Putting aside the lol 1950s American chauvinism character of Mrs. Banks, tbh I vastly prefer the sound of Disney's script to Travers' original. His Mr. Banks sounds better, his Mary Poppins sounds better (although Travers might've been a touch funnier ), and the upper middle class / lower upper class Edwardian setting worked far better than a Depression-era middle class family would have. (Disney was right: it would have been impossible for American audiences, both then and now, to accept that a middle class family could've afforded two maids, a groundskeeper, and a nanny.) While I do agree with Travers that the weakest moments of the Disney film are its animated bits -- I could do without the entire chalk painting scene -- I think it's a shame that she feels the Disney film is so, so bad when really it's quite wonderful, if different from her original story.

I feel like there's an interesting contrast here to be had with Michael Crichton and his best seller Jurassic Park. There we have a similar scenario of a writer being approached by a critically-acclaimed director and being asked for the rights to the film version of his book. And there we have a similar scenario of the film, while decently based on the novel, diverging from it in quite a few ways. The character of Richard Hammond being all but completely rewritten from entrepreneurial villain to bumbling grandfatherly nice guy, famously. Some characters dying in the book but not in the film, other characters dying in the film but not in the book. The film's lack of pterodactyls and other dinosaurs which showed up in the book. The list goes on, of both minor and major changes. Yet what happened when Jurassic Park hit the cinema screens in 1993? Michael Crichton (afaik) was pleased as punch. There was no bitter falling out with Spielberg or with Hollywood. There was no "Omg, they ruined muh book. " There was just additional fame, additional wealth, and additional public awareness of what is perhaps his greatest work. It's no small stretch to say that Spielberg's Jurassic Park can be accredited with making the public aware of such concepts as DNA and genetic engineering. (The former would continue to befuddle the laypublic well into the 1990s, as notoriously seen in the O.J. Simpson trial; the latter was something which the laypublic again didn't really wrap their heads around until Dolly the Sheep at the turn of the century. But Crichton's & Spielberg's Jurassic Park *definitely* got those scientific concepts out there into the wild, freed from their academic cages.) Spielberg's Jurassic Park, much like Disney's Mary Poppins, would go on to win numerous awards or nominations, including three Oscars. But the core difference in this narrative is that while Travers was distraught with Disney's somewhat unfaithful adaptation of her work, I don't think Crichton was anything but delighted with Spielberg's "same but different" take on the story. I think Crichton was comfortable with the idea that there could be different takes on the same narrative, that a film adaptation could be just that -- an adaptation, something free to diverge from the source material -- and that people who wanted the "true" experience or the "canon" tale could always consult the version which started it all: the book. His book.

Perhaps to Travers' credit though, there's another sad difference between her story and Crichton's. And that's that while I know gobs and gobs of people who have gone on to read Jurassic Park the book after having seen the film, I can't think of anyone who ever read Mary Poppins books growing up. We didn't have a single one in our household. I don't recall any of the children from my childhood having made mention of Mary Poppins books. Goosebumps, sure, Hardy Boys, sure, Boxcar Children, sure, but Mary Poppins, no. So unlike Crichton, who could rest easy knowing that people were always seeking out his original manuscript and reading it in supplement to their viewing of the film, Travers was utterly overshadowed by Disney's film and could not enjoy that same emotional comfort of knowing that people were going out of their way to read her version, the original version, and getting all of the Disney changes corrected in their heads and replacing them with Travers' own canonical bits and pieces. For generations of people the world over, Mary Poppins wasn't just primarily Disney's Poppins: she was only Disney's Poppins. Hell, I couldn't have even told you the name of the author was P.L. Travers before this thread: that's just how eclipsed by the Disney film she was.

[Doppleganger]

I think Crichton's case doesn't fit as a glove for comparison. For one, he was a doctor and so had a completely different viewpoint when it came to others handling his material than someone who began as a writer. I haven't heard of many cases where doctors, pharmacists or other professionals gone writer (like Osamu Tezuka, Naoko Takeuchi) thought that the studio that handled their work and became famous for it disrespected the original work. Though, in Tezuka's case his MushiPro handled all of his adaptions, so maybe that doesn't apply either.

I can point to two cases where the authors dropped hate bombs on adaptions of their work - Ursula Le Guin for Tales of Earthsea and Alan Moore for everything ever adapted from him, especially The Watchmen. Le Guin at least was articulate about why she hated the film and polite to its creators, Moore has always conducted himself in a brutally childish manner.

Additionally, Crichton created his work based on science concepts and ideas he didn't come up with, and assembled it into a coherent narrative that used artistic license whenever he saw fit. It would be contradictory for him to have faulted Spielberg for using that very same license. In the above three cases of dissatisfied authors, it usually involved the director of the film being the first to exercise the creative license, which is far more contentious in my view.

[Talon87]

All good points. Thanks for sharing them. I still think it's quite the shame though, for her, that Travers ever agreed to the project in the first place. I still can't help but to ask what on Earth she was expecting from the man who sanitized Cinderella and turned Sleeping Beauty into a bizarrely original fanfic. Like ... seriously. -_-; What was she thinking!?

Cold-hearted though it may be to say ... her loss was our gain.