Mary Poppins: Julie Andrews and P. L. Travers

Mary Poppins: a practically perfect adaptation?

Few people seem to know that before Mary Poppins was a Disney star, she was a literary creation of P. L. Travers’ in a series of children’s books. It probably comes as no surprise that a children’s film has literary origins, but for anyone who has read the novel(s) and seen the read, it’s clear that there are actually plenty of differences between the two. The purpose of this post is not to be a spot-the-difference exercise because that would be dull. I’d rather consider why certain changes were made so that we have the idea of Mary Poppins we have now through Disney. 

The major difference we should probably take into account first is genre or form. Disney’s musical film is charming and wonderful, of course, and Julie Andrews is practically perfect in every way, there’s no doubt on those accounts. In being a musical film Disney’s Mary Poppins is setting a particular tone for the story and giving it the energy of theatrical performance. Travers’ novel (being a novel) doesn’t quite have that same energy and is perhaps more subdued. There’s definitely an abundance of magic and wonder in the novel, but it doesn’t need music to convey those things. So in our two versions we have quite different approaches to magic going on. In the film we’re fully embracing and celebrating the wonder of magic as a performance and a spectacle before our very eyes; in the novel magic is a small, nearly imperceptible twinkle in the eye, there but not there, real but not real. 

Both the film and the novel are episodic in their own ways, and this works in children’s stories, I think. There’s not necessarily a central plot, just a series of mini-adventures which are all fun in their own ways. In some ways, having musical numbers is a way to maintain the energy of the film and set the tone for different scenes without anything getting boring. Particularly since the Disney film has so many distinct musical numbers, we really get a sense of each episode separately. The novel is very much composed of discrete chapters, but the film isn’t necessarily changing that form and creating an overarching plot from nowhere. What the film does instead is to expand the relationships between characters so that they’re all invested in each other, and have a stake in the events. 

Another important part of Disney’s film which makes the whole story feel more cohesive is the attention to historical context. The setting is distinctly Edwardian - the costumes, references to the women’s suffrage movement, the character of Mr Banks and his life philosophies - and we get a sense of the characters all living in the same world, all interacting within a shared culture and environment to one another. Travers’ novel isn’t so concerned with attaching itself to history, and instead gains a timelessness in the fact that you could read it at any time and not necessarily feel like the story was a distant and unfamiliar past. That’s not to say the film isn’t timeless because it subscribes to a context, but that the effect is different. Personally, I enjoy the Edwardian setting of the film - not just because I like the aesthetic but because I feel like having historical context grounds the story and the characters more. But as always, to each their own. 

At the end of the day, whether you are familiar with either the Disney film or Travers’ children’s book, I think Mary Poppins’ life in its various forms is a testament to how creative licence to move away from the original source material is actually very important, and can be a truly positive thing. There’s something quite ominous about the suggestion that adaptations are only good if they are accurate to their sources, but in the first place such a thing is impossible, and more importantly, why would we want that? Adaptation is an opportunity to make something anew, to reinvent it for new audiences, for new circumstances, and to do something that has the stamp of another imagination on it. And isn’t that a wonderful prospect?