We all remember how Mary Poppins and friends jumped into a chalk drawing and took a supercalifragilistic trip to cartoon-land in the 1964 Disney movie, singing and dancing with animated characters thanks to special effects. The sequence is lovingly homaged in the new Mary Poppins Returns, except this time things are not so clear. Even outside this animated sequence, much of Mary Poppins Returns is already, technically, animation: the 1930s cityscapes, the skies, the props, the dolphins in the bathtub … How do we know that’s even the real Emily Blunt? Maybe they never came back from cartoon world? Were they in it already? Are we in it now? Is this actually a sequel to Inception?
It is ironic that the chief threat to this boundary between live action and animation should be Disney, whose corporate edifice was built on cartoon foundations. Recently, Disney has been remaking its animated classics in a house style that looks like photographic reality. It is killing animation off. The 2016 Jungle Book remake was a proof of concept: everything but Mowgli was CGI. It looked almost real. Next year Disney releases Dumbo, Aladdin and The Lion King, with Mulan, The Little Mermaid and Lady and the Tramp in the works. It’s an era of family-friendly deepfakes.
You can see the incentive from Disney’s point of view. Many of these stories are out of copyright and others are muscling in on their territory, such as Andy Serkis’s take on The Jungle Book, or revised fairytales such as Snow White and the Huntsman. There is also the merch and theme-park businesses to keep ticking over. These remakes also offer a chance to iron out the originals’ politically incorrect kinks: let’s see if the new Dumbo features dark-skinned circus workers merrily singing about slave labour and illiteracy.
It goes further than Disney, though. Back in 2013, some pointed out that Gravity would have qualified for the best animated feature Oscar. It was almost all CGI apart from the actors. The Academy’s threshold for the category is that “animation must figure in no less than 75% of the picture’s running time”, by which measure many “live-action” blockbusters would qualify: superhero movies, monster movies, movies about boys stuck on boats with tigers.
Disney and others still put out a lot of traditionally “cartoonish” animation: Ralph Breaks the Internet or The Incredibles 2, say. But it’s a bit like what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard said about how Disneyland is presented as imaginary to make us believe the rest of America is real. We classify some movies as “animation” to convince ourselves the other stuff isn’t animation. Whereas we’re already too far down the chalk drawing to know the difference. It’s all gone a bit Mary Poppins.
Mary Poppins Returns is in UK cinemas now
