I Drew This

A few weeks ago, the household was taken over by Herbie-mania. This past week it’s been Poppins fever. When all the new releases have been taken out, you have to trawl through the weeklies and find something worth watching. This was.

I think it’s one of the lines of Mary in the movie, she says something like ‘Practically perfect people never allow sentiment to cloud their judgment’. I thought this was a character trait that I’d developed rather well, to the point where any pathos or gratuitous sentiment makes me go ‘ewww’. But something about watching Mary Poppins just makes me well up in tears and start blubbering.

Firstly, I think it’s something to do with childhood memories. In the opening sequence of The Wonderful World of Disney there was a clip of the ‘Step in Time’ dance on the rooftops. Of course, I watched that every Sunday night, so that clip of London rooftops is indelibly marked in my memory. Then there’s the music, which (in general) has always been a strong emotional trigger for me but the songs and orchestration in this movie are so rich, every time Julie starts singing Tuppence a Bag the waterworks start all over again.

Watching the DVD extras now adds another bittersweet edge to it as well. Hearing Dick and Julie talk about making the movie, looking at how young and fresh and vibrant they were in the film and how they’ve aged now, looking at the behind-the-scenes footage and stills of the production and seeing how big a part of their lives this must have been (they were nine months in shooting) and how much fun they must have had doing it: all that combined kind of makes everything—childhood, life, gala premières—seem so fleeting and temporary, it just gives me those parental stomach twists that make me want to pick up the kids and hold them and make time stop.

I have to leave it there. All this sentiment is too much for me.