Disney’s rewatchables

There is a tie between a four different movies with regard to which I have seen the most times in the last six months. My son is old enough now to pay attention to some movies almost all the way through, and he can now specifically ask for certain films. But he invariably asks for the same movie. Over and over and over and over. This seems to be a universal constant among toddlers of my acquaintance whose parents expose them to movies. The upside is being able to share some of our childhood (and adulthood) favorites with our son. The downside is finding out by experience how much of a good thing is precisely too much.

The first big hit with our toddler was The Muppet Movie (1979). Though I had seen it at some point as a kid, I don’t think I really sat through the entire thing until college, and then I fell deeply in love with it. For one thing, it’s a gorgeous film with unbelievable production design and cinematography. Secondly, the music is next-level good. Everybody who loves the Muppets loves “The Rainbow Connection,” which is probably the signature song for the entire franchise, but the other songs and score by Paul Willians and Kenny Ascher are rich, playful, and sincere. I also cannot overstate how much I dig this particular film’s loopy humor, which is good-natured enough to feel like a warm bath, but prickly enough never to descend into sentimentality or empty-headed pep. Finally, what most rewards rewatching is the nuance of the performances. I don’t think I would’ve been capable until maybe only five years ago really to appreciate how invisible the puppetry and technical wizardry is in this film. The Muppet performers wring so much personality out of their puppets—and they edit in just enough special effects—in so many ways that it’s kind of entrancing just to see these people work and to appreciate the fruits of what must have been an insane amount of logistical labor. Nowadays, I suspect that puppeteers could just stand in front of the cameras in green suits and be deleted in post, but every single shot of The Muppet Movie is carefully arranged to get the maximum impact out of the limitations inherent in this kind of artifice. It’s simply amazing.

In a similar vein, The Great Muppet Caper (1981) feels to the adult me like Jim Henson just showing off how much he and his crew can do with puppets. As a kid, this was the only Muppet film I had on VHS (taped off of TV), so it’s the one with which I’m most familiar. The Muppet Movie is more rambling, a bit warmer, a bit more invested in turning the Muppets themselves into big-screen icons. Caper wants to make the Muppets the biggest thing on the planet (and acts as if they already are). At some point, I’d be interested to know how the creative collaboration between director James Frawley and Henson et al. actually worked to make the first movie come alive. Maybe it’s a matter of personality or directorial vision, but it might also just be genre. Muppet Movie is self-consciously a road movie: a little more ramshackle in its plotting, a little more concerned with the sights and interesting characters we meet along the way. It feels a bit counter-cultural in a way later Muppets productions just don’t. 

In any case, Henson clearly constructs The Great Muppet Caper as an homage to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s. The dial is stuck at “zany,” and it doesn’t budge except once or twice during the musical numbers—of which there are more, and they’re far more elaborate than anything in Muppet Movie. Henson (self-consciously) owes a lot Busby Berkeley in the jaw-dropping song and dance sequences. The fourth-wall-breaking is also more in keeping with the vibe of The Muppet Show, where we’re never allowed to forget that everything here is a performance for our entertainment. I love this movie dearly and with the passion of nostalgia.

Between the two films, I think I’m more in awe of Henson and his crew’s accomplishments in Caper, as well as some surprisingly clear-headedness about the ickiness of Charles Grodin’s villain, whom the film casts as the epitome toxic masculinity. In a franchise where one of Animal’s signature moves is literally to chase and molest women, that kind of insight is welcome. But the frenetic pace and the zany performativity means that, as fun as it is (and it’s a busload of fun), it’s a mite exhausting. What makes The Muppet Movie one of the great films of all time is that it perfectly straddles the line between parodic self-awareness and emotional sincerity. I don’t think that Caper is insincere, per se, but I think the looser aesthetic on Muppet Movie allows for a little more reflection and appreciation. It’s not as exhausting, and its approach to the audience is less grab-you-by-the-lapels and more “Hello, Stranger, come sit by the fire.

It’s worth noting that I have also rewatched Muppets Take Manhattan, Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppets from Space, Muppet Treasure Island, and 2011’s Muppets in the last few months, along with a goodly chunk of the original variety show. Of those, I think I enjoy Muppets from Space the most, in no small part because I think it feels most like The Muppet Movie. The show is, of course, insane and wonderful.

Another of my favorite films of all time is 1964’s Mary Poppins. This is one where my family had the VHS (remember those white, spongy clamshell cases? Anyone?), and I conservatively estimate that I saw the film 60 or more times over the course of my childhood. When I got to be a teenager, I went through an anti-kid-movie phase to prove how adult I was, and then I (thank God) matured beyond that when I entered actual adulthood. I’ve seen Mary Poppins at all stages of my life, and I don’t think there has ever been a time when I did not, in my deepest heart, love it.

A less generous way to put it might be that I’m incapable of viewing the film outside of my own nostalgia for it, which is true. But there have been plenty of childhood favorites that I’ve seen as an adult that have aged quite poorly. I’m not embarrassed by Mary Poppins, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that I’m proud to have absorbed it into my cultural DNA. I don’t think it’s honest or fair for me to talk about my experience of a movie without incorporating my relationship with it into that discussion. In the case of Mary Poppins, though, I think it strives to achieve a certain effect, and for anyone who appreciates that effect in their movie viewing experience, very few films do it quite as well.

Mary Poppins, more than perhaps any other live-action film ever produced by Disney, so adeptly exploits its audience’s desire for escapism while folding the fulfillment of that desire into an encomium for the bourgeois family. When critics rail against the ideology of Disney movies, this is the Platonic ideal of that ideology in movie form. Among its other potential aesthetic sins are its running time (it is a bit long, isn’t it?), its lack of character development for Jane and Michael (and nearly everyone else, for that matter), and maybe one or two other things against which churls find the strength perpetually to grind their axes. (Too much pastel in the art direction, perhaps?) In short, it’s maybe a bit shallow and given to excess. Compelling arguments certainly can and have been made to that effect, and that’s why I think Mary Poppins is so emblematic of the Disney brand itself.

Though I’ve been a Mary Poppins booster for years, I don’t think the case for its greatness would be so necessary had I not seen Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns (2018). Mary Poppins Returns is another Platonic ideal, but of a different kind of film. It’s a sequel that slavishly attempts to replicate the structural, emotional, and aesthetic beats of the first film while at the same time completely missing the point that makes the first film so special. In every way, it’s inferior to the original, with the possible exception of a very capable and charming cast.

It’s almost a problem that the cast of Mary Poppins Returns is so engaging. Mainly, I think the problem is that the film around them is so bad that it makes me resent the film even more for not doing right by them. But it also highlights how difficult it is to recast iconic characters. Replacing Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber with Emily Mortimer and Ben Wishaw is fine, I guess. Mortimer and Wishaw are world-class actors, and they bring a lot to the table. The actual kids in the movie are also fine; I can’t fault any of them, though I also can no longer picture their faces or voices at all. I even think that Emily Blunt is a fine Mary Poppins. Julie Andrews is irreplaceable, and I think that Blunt knows it, so she does what she can; as a charismatic, versatile performer, I enjoyed her on screen, and she was Mary Poppins enough that the fact of her not being Julie Andrews didn’t take me out of the move. More than that, I suspect it’s necessary for Mary Poppins to remain eternally young, so the vagaries of time (and the fact that Andrews herself simply can’t sing like she used to, even if we could do an Old Mary Poppins movie) means that it’s just not an option for the one and only Mary Poppins to actually be in the movie.

The weird thing is when Dick Van Dyke shows up as Mr. Dawes, Jr. In the original film, Van Dyke played Mr. Dawes, Sr., and the character actor Arthur Malet played Dawes, Jr. (You may also remember Malet as Tootles, the Lost Boy who uses the last of the pixie dust to fly back to Neverland at the end of Hook.) It’s only weird because Van Dyke doesn’t play Dawes like Malet did; he plays him like a cool great-uncle. It’s a far cry from the grasping old magnate he portrayed Dawes, Sr. to be, and Malet had played Dawes, Jr. as a bit of an overprotective, unctuous toady, even if he was redeemed a bit by the end of the film. 

If Van Dyke had not shown up at all in Mary Poppins Returns, it wouldn’t really matter. But his presence alone activates all those memories and feeling—which is precisely the filmmakers’ calculation, I think. It’s the classy thing to do to put Van Dyke in the film; it acknowledges the legacy of the original film and gives the audience a bit of fanservice. Fine, but it is also distracting, because literally every other role is recast, and Van Dyke is even recast in a different role. The movie wants to have it both ways: it wants to cash in on all the good will that Van Dyke’s presence alone calls up, but it wants you to buy into all the new people that have taken over the characters you treasure from the first film—and not hold it against Returns that they’re just not the same.

That’s Mary Poppins Returns in a nutshell: everything’s different, but it tries to be exactly the same, even when it can’t be. Just odd and offputting.

Returns spends almost every moment of its running time explicitly invoking the original film, then deviates in the most profound way right at the climax. The 2013 biopic Saving Mr. Banks did an okay job dramatizing the significance of the fact that in the original Mary Poppins, the emotional climax of the film is Mr. Banks (the transcendently engaging David Tomlinson) returning to the Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank to face his termination with a stiff upper lip. It’s an extraordinarily affecting scene, and director Robert Stevenson pulls out all the stops in his staging. It’s kind of weird that a movie mostly about the magical adventures of a couple of middle-class kids and their practically perfect nanny climaxes with the story of a man who, at the lowest moment of his life, realizes how much he has to live for: his family. 

It’s a moment that the film sets up, but doesn’t spend most of its time on, so when it arrives, it feels like a sucker punch, but a beautifully executed one. There’s no magic to save Mr. Banks in that moment. His epiphany is slow to come, and it’s mostly instigated by Bert, Van Dyke’s factotum who’s a sort of Greek chorus and fellow traveler. It’s also Bert who explains to the children how much trouble he’s in. Mary Poppins is not even present for these two most crucial scenes of emotional development in the film. She doesn’t need to be. Her work has been more subtle and more encompassing. And the film trusts the audience to be invested in whether or not Banks realizes how important his family ought to be to him. It’s a movie that shows how much more invested the nanny—who ultimately spends, what, three days with the children?—seems to be than the patriarch, then puts the burden on the father to turn his priorities around. That’s the climax. Brilliant.

Returns has the grown-up Michael go through almost the exact same arc, but that’s not the climax of the film. The climax of Returns winds up being a Macguffin hunt where the family (reunited and recommitted to each other) has to race to the bank to prove that it has the deed to the house. It’s a madcap action sequence, and the climax of the film is not a restrained, somberly joyful epiphany, but a spectacle of Mary Poppins herself taking to the sky on her umbrella to hold Big Ben’s ticking just long enough for the Banks family to retain its property by a midnight dealine. 

In short, the emotional arc that makes the original film so great is sidelined in favor of the title character doing something showy and magical to bail everyone out, even after their best efforts fail. To me, that’s the opposite of what makes the original Mary Poppins magical. The 1964 film is about the nanny inspiring every member of the household to put forth their best effort, to reconnect with each other, to live with joy; the 2018 is simply about how awesome Mary Poppins is. She is awesome. She’s practically perfect. But that’s not actually what the original film is about, and apparently nobody making the sequel understood that elemental point.

In 1971, many of the same crew from Mary Poppins, including Stevenson, Richard and Robert Sherman, Bill Walsh, Don DaGradi, and Irwin Kostal, collaborated on Bedknobs and Broomsticks, adapted from the work of Borrowers author Mary Norton. As you may expect, many of the same animators worked on the animated sequences, minus Hamilton Luske. Tomlinson co-stars in the film, playing a happy-go-lucky charlatan, and Angela Lansbury plays a country witch who takes in some orphans during the Blitz. I grew up with Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and as an adult, it’s easy to recognize its raggedy, shaggedy edges, especially in contrast to the much sharper Mary Poppins. For a film set during the war and which climaxes with a Nazi raid on English soil, there’s a strange lack of urgency in it, and even some of the best sequences simply lack the energy that infuses almost every moment of Mary Poppins. 

One of the most memorable sequences, featuring “The Beautiful Briny” (originally written for Poppins), literally has the main cast simply sitting on a bed as it ferries them about a lagoon as if it were a ride at Disneyland itself. The stars themselves, of course, are a good bit older than Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke were when they did Poppins. I dearly love Lansbury and Tomlinson, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything, but there’s simply no way that they could or would perform the same choreography from “Jolly Holiday” or “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” The film is just not as snappy as Poppins, and so it doesn’t quite hold together as tightly. Mary Poppins itself is really episodic, but those episodes feel much more coherent as a narrative with all the momentum pressing them together.

All the same, Bedknobs is extremely diverting, and my son has really cottoned to Miss Price and Mr. Brown, Lansbury and Tomlinson’s characters. That’s probably the other big difference between this film and Poppins. Even if Andrews and Van Dyke are the star attractions, it’s still about the Banks family. This one is much more about Price and Brown themselves. The kids are just along for the ride. And as in Mary Poppins, Tomlinson is the one who gets to play the most substantial emotional arc, from shameless charlatan to self-sacrificing hero. Lansbury gets a more subtle arc, as she evolves from confirmed spinster (and probably village oddball) to maternal warrior.

On rewatch, I most appreciate some of the smaller touches in the film, like the bond that develops between Brown and Charlie, the oldest kid who is a bit of a scammer himself. I also appreciate how in-the-moment Cindy O’Callaghan is in every scene, like when she’s trying to dance along with the performers in “Portobello Road” or the tears she’s failing to hold back when Mr. Brown is about to leave near the film’s climax. I also really love Roy Snart as the youngest kid, who’s got the most to do of all the kids; he’s got attitude to spare. On the whole, the young actors in Bedknobs are probably more accomplished and more relaxed than Dotrice and Garber, and it really helps the film. It also greatly amuses me that all of Miss Price’s spells are written on pink-backed paper. I have no idea why that choice was made; probably just to make it more visually striking when an animated flying sword flips them all over the place. I also dig that most of the German in the film is not subtitled; it’s easy enough to track what’s happening in those scenes, even without the translation. For some reason, there’s also a clanging ship’s bell whenever the bear that fishes the heroes out of the lagoon manages to stutter out the word “throw.”

As a spectacle, there are two moments I particularly love. First, the football game on the isle of Naboombu is utterly bonkers in the best way. It has a Warner Brothers feel to it that is a welcome tonic after the diverting-but-milquetoast sequence in the lagoon. I also love the shot at the climax of the film that pans across the legions of animated armor standing shoulder to shoulder across a ridge, with Miss Price flying into frame on her broom, silhouetted by the moonlight. The music swells in just the right way, and it feels like a weirdly earned moment. Also, as in Mary Poppins, Tomlinson is the film’s secret weapon, and his arc is the most substantial; he’s a delight.

There are probably a lot of things these films have in common, besides the fact that my toddler seemingly can’t get enough of them. The big one, of course, is that they’re all currently owned by Disney.

This is one of those ineluctable facts that hits harder when I reflect on the fact that I’m now a parent; I’m responsible for the culture my child consumes, and he’s young enough that I actually can filter it more or less successfully. I dearly love the Muppets. I dearly love Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. A lot of it is my own past history with these intellectual properties, but the truth is that I also enjoy them as an adult. I do want to share my enjoyment of these things with my son. But it’s extremely discomfiting to realize that the movies my son seems to enjoy the most are all controlled by a single corporate entity.

And so what if they are? Well, there are probably dozens of academic monographs and articles about the various evils of the Disney corporation. I feel like I don’t need to litigate that case here, because it’s easy enough to find far more recondite versions of it elsewhere than any I could make. It’s not just that the company itself is problematic. It’s that I’m giving it a portal into my toddler’s brain and heart. 

It disturbs me a bit, I admit, not to know precisely what it is about Bedknobs and Broomsticks, for instance, that seems to be so addictive to my son. He has asked to watch it every single day for the past eleven days. It’s not a great film, though it is enjoyable. What is it, though, that makes it so irresistible? Unless I take the time to research child brain development and how Disney’s expert aestheticians have hacked it, I don’t think I’ll ever know. We’ll set that aside for the moment. The fact is that he is far more absorbed in these movies than virtually anything else we put on the screen—and we’ve tried a lot of different (age-appropriate) things. Why? What does Disney know that I don’t? And to what use do they put that power, really?

These are questions that I’ve mostly glossed over in my own life, given that I, too, enjoy Disney products—the MCU being a prime example, but also a lot of artifacts from my own childhood that hold up into adulthood. I can do that because, well, I’m an adult, and that’s my choice. But I’m the on responsible for the choices my toddler is enabled to make. Part of me is glad that he enjoys these movies. Another part of me simply wonders if the Disney formula that was apparently perfected by at least the 1960s is part and parcel of algorithmic culture. If all our brains are eminently hackable because they’ve always already been hacked, and if we perpetuate it because we ourselves just can’t imagine entertainment in substantial ways beyond the Disney bubble.☕︎