How did Disney bring Mary Poppins to the big screen?

The forthcoming Saving Mr. Banks starring Emma Thompson (double Oscar winner) and Tom Hanks (also double Oscar winner)is a dark film that tells the heart-breaking true story behind one of the great characters in children’s movie history.

P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson), the nanny’s formidable creator, is pitted against Walt Disney (Tom Hanks), who promised his daughters that he’d bring Poppins to the big screen.

According to The Daily Beast, Saving Mr. Banks goes behind the scenes of the ferocious battle to make what was to become the famous 1964 musical adaptation. For 20 years, Travers refused to grant the rights to Disney. Eventually she said she would relent, but only if the movie was made to her specifications, which ranged from choosing the precise tape measure used in one scene to the exclusion of the color red from the entire movie.

Through a series of flashback sequences, we learn that Travers’s intense stubbornness is rooted in her own traumatic childhood. The raw emotion that builds up through the movie is, thankfully, helped down by a spoonful of sugar provided by Thompson’s comic mastery of the irascible Travers, which begins as soon as she sets foot on the plane from London to Los Angeles.

As Hanks and Thompson do battle, there is a sweeping emotional tale that will have tears streaming down the faces of many people in the theatre. Despite the power of that story, it is the 1960s culture-clash exchanges that make this movie such a delight.