Mary Poppins

Julie Andrews won an Oscar 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.