To be released from The Walt Disney Company Africa onto the circuit on February 21 is Saving Mr. Banks.
Two-time Academy Award®–winners Emma
Thompson and Tom Hanks topline this movie which is inspired by the extraordinary,
untold backstory of how Disney’s classic Mary
Poppins made it to the screen.
When Walt Disney’s daughters begged him to
make a movie of their favourite book, P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins, he made them a promise - one that he didn’t realize
would take 20 years to keep. In his quest to obtain the rights, Walt comes up
against a curmudgeonly, uncompromising writer who has absolutely no intention
of letting her beloved magical nanny get mauled by the Hollywood machine.
However, as the books stop selling and money
grows short, Travers reluctantly agrees to go to Los Angeles to hear Disney’s
plans for the adaptation. For those two short weeks in 1961, Walt Disney pulls
out all the stops. Armed with imaginative storyboards and chirpy songs from the
talented Sherman brothers, Walt launches an all-out onslaught on P.L. Travers,
but the prickly author doesn’t budge.
It is only when he reaches into his own
childhood that Walt discovers the truth about the ghosts that haunt her, and
together they set Mary Poppins free to make ultimately one of the most
endearing films in cinematic history.
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