#morimocchi

Life unfolds in a weird way. Leaving Japan and going to Hawaii made him grow closer to the other man, even more so than when they were together almost every other day having activities together.

‘Busy?’ The pop out of his LINE messenger app flashes on his screen, and Ryutaro smiles at the name. 

‘Hmm, busy is good. What about you?’ He types on his phone with practiced moves. 

How long have they been just texting? Years. 

When was the last time they met each other? When he just came back to Japan, maybe?

Both of them are public figures, and people are looking at each and every actions (and Ryutaro learnt it the hard way). 

‘Nothing new. Just lazing around for the day with my cats.’ Ryutaro chuckles, reminded how no one knew about his cats, and how even Hikaru stayed over and not know. Watch the episode of Itadaki High Jump made him crack up so hard, and he thinks that they are just as good without him. He doesn’t fit there.

‘Sounds good to be resting, I’m still on the way home.’ His muscles are aching and he can’t wait to collapse on his bed and get his much needed rest. They are texting in English, something that they’ve done over the years at Ryutaro’s request to improve his English while he was in Hawaii.

‘Call me when you get home.’ 

A smile tugs at the edge of his lips, and Ryutaro can’t help but giggle to himself like a high school girl.

‘Yeah, I will. After I shower.’

‘Yeah. I miss you.’

I think it was good but not nearly as good as the first, although that would be difficult to do. I liked this movie more than the Broadway musical though, hands down. 

I think it was very “Disney sequel” in that it’s very much like the first, in general plot, but I think that it had more nods to grown ups than it did to kids. They showed a lot more emotion and the inner workings of Mary Poppins, like her listening to the kids behind doors or seeing what they were going to do, the audience was more complicit with her in this version and that was a choice I don’t know I would have made. Still, Emily was exceptional, I was absolutely not expecting to believe that she was the character but she did a great job portraying her. 

I think that doing the same things was a risk, much like what they did with Star Wars. Because since there are scenes that are very clearly the same from the other movie, but different slightly, you’re going to compare. There’s the “Step In Time” bit, there’s the animated sequence (which was amazingly animated), there’s the whole bank ordeal, there’s a family member on the roof singing a song about not being able to control something, there’s a song to put the kids to sleep, there’s a father in trouble, there’s a happy go lucky working class man with a weird accent whom everyone loves...all the main plot points were the same albeit with some differences that relate to the needs of a current audience (more action scenes, less length of the movie overall, a more emotionally expressive father, etc.). 

The good side of that is that people who are nostalgic about the original are going to remember and appreciate the nods, but the bad side is that they’re going to compare, and even if it’s a good movie on its own, it loses in a competition against the first one. Not because it’s a sequel or anything, but because to me it’s more expected and there’s more focus on giving you emotion though nostalgia than through the movie itself. 

For example, I liked the fact that Michael was more visibly vulnerable than his father and that he didn’t treat his kids badly, but I felt less emotion with his scene crying in front of his kids than I do in the entire sequence of Mr. Banks walking towards the Bank at night knowing he will be fired and feeling he has failed his family. In the original movie, the emotion was earned through development, in this one, it’s all off camera, because Michael’s turmoil is told rather than shown, he lost his wife before the movie and he just has one song about it and then he’s frantically looking for a paper. 

In this movie the one moment that made me super emotional was because of its relation to the first one: the moment when Dick Van Dyke’s character tells Michael that his father opened an account investing the tuppence Michael had given to him after what happened in the bank. And it was a great scene and a great dialogue and great acting but also the relation to that moment in the first movie that always makes me emotional (and makes me cry both in Saving Mr. Banks and in Mary Poppins) PLUS the fact that Dick Van Dyke was the one telling the story what earned the emotion, not the building of it from this movie by itself.  

The kids were also...off? What I liked about the Banks kids in the first movie was that they were neither naughty children nor absolute angels, they were just kids, regular normal kids, because Mary Poppins was there to save Mr. Banks and the family rather than fix the kids. In this movie there’s the twins who are super mature for their age and Georgie who’s kind of a mess. I felt they could have been just two kids and it would have been the same. I don’t know, I felt these kids were a bit meh. I mean, as a kid I could relate to Jane and Michael, but idk if I would have felt I could relate to these kids, these felt less like kids in a movie for kids and more like how a movie for grown ups would interpret kids, I don’t know if that makes sense. 

I was also confused about them hiding the “magic”. Mary Poppins dismissed things here and there in the first film but they never outright hid the stuff she did. For example, when in the first movie the chimney sweepers came from the chimney into the house, everyone saw them, Mr. Banks saw them, nobody hid that. In this one, when that segment ends and Michael opens the door, they’re gone, as if they hadn’t been there. That happens a lot throughout the movie until the very end, which made me think that maybe it was a visual metaphor for Michael believing again in magic, but in the first movie it was never implied that Mr. Banks or anyone else was unable to see the things Mary Poppins did even if they didn’t believe them. It was like the things she did were there in plain sight for anyone to see but some grown ups chose to not pay attention to them or tried to impose logic on them (like Mr. Banks) and others went along with them just fine (like Bert). Here it’s like they’re hidden away.  

I did like that the relationship between Michael and his kids was different than what he had with his own father and that Jane was clearly following her mother’s footsteps in terms of taking a political stance (I will forever defend the choice of making Winifred Banks a suffragette even if Travers didn’t like it). I wish we could have seen Michael going back to painting and all that more clearly later, but still, I liked the Banks kids as grown ups. 

Julie Walters as Ellen was so good, I loved her, she did a great job. And Lin Manuel Miranda was a good “new Dick Van Dyke”, I think he was a great choice for the role, and he put his own spin on it.  

The animated segment was amazing and I wish Disney brought back the 2d studio because that’s what they should be doing more of, dammit. The songs were nice but not nearly as good as the Sherman brothers’ songs, but that’s a tough act to follow. Still, they were nice songs.