Tom Hanks as Walt Disney. If you need another selling point on seeing Saving Mr. Banks, you've clearly gotten way too far away from your childhood. But just in case, here's the first trailer for Saving Mr. Banks (via AOL), which ought to give you a million other reasons to see the movie-- Emma Thompson as the uptight Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers, a classic conflict between an amiable American and a stuffy Brit, a trip to old-school DIsneyland, and appearances from basically every character actor you like-- Bradley Whitford! Paul Giamatti! B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman playing the piano! Go buy your tickets now, boys and girls!
OK, sure, the movie looks a little sentimental, drifting in the second half into emotional music and vague promises about how much the character of Mary Poppins means for Travers, who had refused over and over again to let the character be adapted for film. But this is a Disney about a Disney movie, and a classic one at that-- they wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't try to get you to tear up just a little. And as we discussed yesterday when the film's first official image was released, Tom Hanks is a human nearly as iconic as Disney himself at this point. Just the sight of him smiling-- and on a carousel!-- is enough to give you the warm fuzzes.
And warm fuzzes is exactly what Disney is promising, in spades, with the planned December 13 release of Saving Mr. Banks, a contender both in the Oscar race and the crowded holiday movie season. For more, here's the film's official synopsis. Let us know what you think of Hanks's transformation into Uncle Walt in the comments.
Two-time Academy Award®–winner Emma Thompson and fellow double Oscar®-winner Tom Hanks topline Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks, 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 favorite 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. But, 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. He soon begins to watch helplessly as Travers becomes increasingly immovable and the rights begin to move further away from his grasp.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 ultimately make one of the most endearing films in cinematic history.
