Mary Poppins Returns (2018)

Mary Poppins Returns is the appropriately titled and long belated sequel to the 1964 Disney classic Mary Poppins. With almost 55 years between movies one wonders why wait so long? Well a Mary Poppins sequel has actually been in "development hell" (industry term) since the year after the first film was released. The finicky author of the Mary Poppins book series P.L. Travers retained rights to the property and throw up road blocks to production, if you've seen the movie Saving Mr. Banks you can readily imagine this. Travers died in 1996 but it took the recent box office streak of Disney remakes and reboots to get the project back off the ground. Besides if your going to wait this long you want to make sure that you do the project right. To ensure this happens, to ensure that the beloved property was honored, and practically treated as scripture, they played it really safe. However this works.

Mary Poppins Returns is not a great a movie, for one thing it spends far too much time reminding you of one that is. This I think was unavoidable, but is extra pronounced as the powers that be took the original film as template in much the same way that Star Wars: The Force Awakens shamelessly cribbed from Star Wars: A New Hope. This movie is near beat for beat an evocation of the original. The classic Sherman Brothers songs seemingly each have an analogue, parallel scenes are legion. There is a scene where the live action characters interact with animation, there is a scene and a song on a ceiling, instead of dancing chimney sweeps you have dancing lamp lighters.

The biggest contrast with the first film is that the tone is darker, though hardly unbearably so. Mary Poppins, this time played "practically perfectly" by Emily Blunt returns to 17 Cherry Tree Lane in 1935 to help a recently widowed Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw, Q in the Daniel Craig James Bond films) reconnect with his children, avert economic catastrophe, and if not so much fly a kite, at least hold a balloon. The three young kids are all fine, Emily Mortimer is cute a Jane Banks, and Lin-Manuel Miranda sings, but did not write the music, which seems like a lost opportunity, though I think the new songs are actually better then a lot of people are giving them credit for.

The movie contains some appropriate cameos from nonagenarians Angela Lansbury and Dick Van Dyke, the latter still spry. Meryl Streep is also in the movie for one musical number, she's not bad here but her casting seems odd and a little random. Perhaps the best thing about the this movie is that it looks and feels like a Disney movie from 50 years ago, a lot of attention is paid to production design, and the animation sequences look like 1960's animation sequences, not like lame reproductions, they look remarkably authentic. One thing I haven't seen commented on is that when the credits role at the end the background isn't just black, but a subtle blue and while I can't say for sure I tend to remember that being common in Disney films of that era. My biggest regret in watching this film was not watching the original film again shortly before, to get my bearings on stuff like this.

Mary Poppins Returns is a good movie, I'd say an acceptable successor but in no way an equal to the original film. If you have kids, it's probably worth taking them to see this in the theater as a memory, and even if you don't its an enjoyably retro experience. ***