Mary Poppins Returns (2018)

Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns takes place twenty years after the first film. The Banks children have grown up and the son Michael Banks (Ben Whishaw) is now a widowed father of three, facing getting his house in Cherry Tree Lane repossessed by the bank. As he is clearing out the attic for proof of shares in the bank, which will save his home, he junks an old kite which brings Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) back into their lives.

The film hangs on Emily Blunt’s beautiful performance as Poppins. Although, it’s also packed with good music and set dance pieces. There’s a particularly enjoyable sequence in homage to the chimney sweep song in the 1964 film with street lamplighters, and a terrific vaudeville duet by Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who plays lamplighter Jack, of a song called ‘A Cover is not a Book’.

This is great family fun. It’s got beautiful costumes and there’s a brilliant animation sequence in a nod to the original. The children in it (Pixie Davies, John Nathanael Saleh, Joel Dawson) are all very good, and Whishaw’s grieving father brings a softness to the film. There are some minor characters which work quite well – such as Colin Firth as an evil banker, and some which don’t – like Meryl Streep as cousin Topsy.

Director Rob Marshall does a fine job, although it doesn’t have the heart, humour or depth of recent British children’s films like Paddington 2. It does, however, have the feel-good factor, just the right pace, some great cameos, and dazzling visual style. It knocks the socks off the recent Disney effort The Nutcracker, but it probably won’t make the impact of the original Mary Poppins film.