Mary Poppins Response

I recall watching Mary Poppins as a child, however, I don't remember much at all of the movie other than thinking Mary Poppins was fantastical and amazing and an oddly specific scene of her pulling out a bunch of things from her bag. Of course, by only having the Disney movie from my childhood along with what I'd heard about Mary Poppins for my background coming into this book, I was thoroughly shocked when I saw who Mary Poppins actually was and how she behaved. While she obviously retained all of the fantastical and magical qualities I recalled/expected her to have, her personality was vastly different. For some reason, I expected a perfectly nice nanny that took the kids on magical, amazing adventures, and while in some senses that was true, it was also very false overall. Mary Poppins, with magic and all, actually turned out to be vain, manipulative, strict, and not really likable at all, which really rubbed me the wrong way. While it's true the kids did go on many adventures with her and while she was a good nanny overall, I suppose, she just wasn't what I was expecting. As such, reading the book made me also realize how it certainly would not be just a "children's book."

Travers makes a lot of social commentaries on childhood, adulthood, and everything they entail. For starters, the fact that Mary Poppins always denies the fantasies after they occur kept on annoying me, but it made sense from a certain perspective. For me, it was relatable in the sense that when you're a kid and you still have a wild imagination, oftentimes, adults don't believe everything you tell them because they know that not all of it is necessarily true. In reality, regardless of the validity of the stories you tell as a child, the sheer frustration of not being believed is the same frustration I felt when Mary Poppins denied the magic that she so clearly was present for. This relationship between childhood imagination and adulthood staleness is bridged by Poppins as she is an adult but she can relate to and experience the childhood imagination. Overall, Travers is making a general commentary on the loss of imaginative capacity as kids grow up. 

I do think it's interesting that Disney picked up Mary Poppins. While the story does share some classic Disney hallmarks such as magic, adventure, and kids, I wouldn't say it fits the Disney version right off the bat. I think this is why they did make the changes they did to the film, that way it could be more of a family movie. While it's possible that canonically, Poppins is a witch, that would be more of a methodology to get her to do what she does than an actually important detail. I think the more important part is that Mary Poppins has the ability to cause these changes to the natural world through magical-like powers, and whether she has these because she's a witch, fairy, or from the future is totally irrelevant. The relevance is more in what she does, as that's what pushes the story forward, and especially the fact that she denies it, which always leaves a sliver of a doubt that we are actually not getting the full story. It's always possible that the reader's view is obscured/pushed into the imaginative state of a child, and in reality, Mary isn't actually doing these things and we just think she is just like the kids. That would be both an interesting conspiracy theory and commentary on childhood imagination if Travers actually makes the reader likened to a child, however, although it's an intersesting theory,  I don't think it's actually at play.