Pondering Into the Disney Legacy

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 2016)

Following three years since its release, I can't help but express how thought-provoking Saving Mr. Banks turned out since the day I first watched it on opening night. The 1960s became one of the last prominent moments in Uncle Walt's lifetime that he witnessed before he passed away, but it's really about how one movie almost never came to be. About how the Mouse met the Magical Nanny.
The story follows P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson), the renowned author of the Mary Poppins books. In 1961, when Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) asks for her to fly to America to meet her personally about his film adaptation of her book, she reluctantly accepts to meeting him. Despite her tragic and bitter past life that greatly dictated her present self, Travers learns from Walt's experience that it doesn't have to be that way and what really matters is letting go and keep moving forward.
Director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side) definitely showed the tribulations and conflicts Travers had when overseeing the production of Walt Disney's Mary Poppins adaptation. It may have gotten off to a troubling start with her not being open to how each character in her book should be portrayed as well as showing disdain on a few songs, even the animation that Walt wanted to include, but upon seeing the progress of where the direction was going, there were signs that she was beginning to warm up to it. I loved how a few scenes began to jump ahead back and forth on a recurring basis between glimpses of her childhood and then into how that reflected onto her books.
Tom Hanks' take on Walt was pretty uncanny in how he segued into sounding like him and Emma Thompson's portrayal as P.L. Travers showed angst and bittersweetness, yet is misunderstood as a troubled individual that had a rough childhood. I was also left in awe on how in one scene Disneyland was shown as it once looked in the 60s. Looked pretty nifty as though you've traveled back in time. Overall, it's a dramatic and tense element deep beneath the inner workings of light-hearted Disney.