When Walt Disney's daughters begged him to make a movie of their favorite book, P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins (1964), he made them a promise - one that he didn't realize would take 20 years to keep. In his quest to obtain the rights, Walt comes up against a curmudgeonly, uncompromising writer who has absolutely no intention of letting her beloved magical nanny get mauled by the Hollywood machine. But, as the books stop selling and money grows short, Travers reluctantly agrees to go to Los Angeles to hear Disney's plans for the adaptation. For those two short weeks in 1961, Walt Disney pulls out all the stops. Armed with imaginative storyboards and chirpy songs from the talented Sherman brothers, Walt launches an all-out onslaught on P.L. Travers, but the prickly author doesn't budge. He soon begins to watch helplessly as Travers becomes increasingly immovable and the rights begin to move further away from his grasp. It is only when he reaches into his own childhood that Walt discovers the truth about the ghosts that haunt her, and together they set Mary Poppins free to ultimately make one of the most endearing films in cinematic history.



Trivia About Movie

~P.L. Travers never did warm up to the song "Let's Go Fly a Kite", as depicted in the film. According to Richard M. Sherman, it was "Feed the Birds" that actually won her over.

~To prepare for his role, Tom Hanks made several visits to the Walt Disney Family Museum at San Francisco's Presidio and interviewed some of Walt Disney's relatives, including his daughter, Diane Disney Miller.

~The production team were absolutely meticulous about every detail of Tom Hanks' portrayal of Walt Disney, right down to measuring the exact length of his mustache.

~For the Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color (1954) television show Mrs. Travers watches in the film, Tom Hanks watched all of the episodes of the "Disneyland" and "The Wonderful World of Color" shows at the recommendation of Diane Disney Miller, Walt's daughter, to get a sense of how Walt presented himself on television. Also for the "Disneyland" television episode sequence, master animator Mark Henn and the Special Projects unit of Walt Disney Animation Studios re-created Tinker Bell to appear alongside Hanks, instead of reusing shots of Tinker Bell from the original television show.

~Emma Thompson remarked in an interview with Mark Kermode how the song "Let's Go Fly a Kite" is very interesting since the chord D-Minor was considered "of the Devil", it comes from a dark place of the human consciousness. They listened to this song many times while making the movie, and never got fed up of hearing it due to its emotional resonance; for it carries great power, and makes you cry