As always, school stuff has caught up with me and I've let this slide a bit. Here's some brief thoughts on the things I've watched.
Mary Poppins
As always, Julie Andrews is incandescent. She's practically perfect in every way. This time around, though, I felt weirder about some of the implications of the story. The strangeness of this woman magically appearing in order to whip a house into order so that the male head-of-household can retain his job and piece of mind. The suffragette's passion gets kind of pushed to the side as this vision of strict-but-fun domestic bliss rights every wrong then flies away once she's sure the patriarchal order can continue. It's just a bit icky. Still, some great songs and segments here make it fun to watch. Which is maybe the most insidious thing about it.
B+
The Jungle Book
Story? What's that? Again, some of the songs are good and I have some nostalgic fondness for a few of the characters. But this time around, it was majorly weird to hear Winnie-the-Pooh trying to seduce everybody else in the form of a snake. And the ending, which again posits hetero-romance as a positive force of domestication, is bad. Like, a major sour note. And much of the animation feels less good than the other stuff I've seen for this class.
C+
The Wide World of Disney: Disneyland Through the Seasons
Gosh, I love this shit. There's something fascinating about the combination of boasting, selling, and myth-making that is on display here. Throw in nostalgia for a place I've never been and a time I wasn't born in and you've got a real stew going. There's about 15 minutes spent on the opening of It's A Small World, which has the kind of benign liberal racism that feels quaint in today's climate of racial resentment. It is also kinda funny to frame this as a "through the seasons" thing, which it kinda sticks to, when it's all happening in the temperate climate of sunny California. But whatever, it's cool. History and advertisement all at once.
A-