Mary Poppins

(Robert Stevenson, US 1964, 139 min., DCP)

Julie Andrews won an Academy Award for her performance as that magical English nanny, Mary Poppins. Shot in Technicolor and combining live-action with animation, this charming musical is set in London during the progressive era and resolves many of the period’s social concerns—suffrage, class antagonisms, and child labor—in a manner possible only at Disney. Yet the film also retains a melancholy sense of innocence lost, evoked most powerfully in its famous chimney-sweep ballet sequence. One of a record fifty-nine Oscar nominations for Walt Disney, it was the only time he had ever been nominated as producer of a Best Picture nominee.