Episode 35 - Mary Poppins Returns (Rob Marshall, 2018) (with Christian Kaestner & Frederikke Glick)
Mary Poppins Returns (Rob Marshall, 2018).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Trip a little light fantastic with Episode 35 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which marks Chris and Alex’ very own return to Cherry Tree Lane as they visit musical sequel Mary Poppins Returns (Rob Marshall, 2018). Joining them underneath the lovely London sky are Visual Effects Supervisor Christian Kaestner and Compositing Supervisor Frederikke Glick, who both worked as part of VFX studio Framestore’s contribution to the film. Topics for discussion include the construction a fictional London that owes a debt to design of the 1964 original; the ‘keying’ or extracting of bluescreen and greenscreen images as part of the compositing process; the production of the Royal Doulton Music Hall sequence; lighting effects and practical sets in the film’s climactic Big Ben set piece; and the pleasurable fantasy of hybridity when integrating (yet keeping separate) live-action and cel-animated components. Off we go!
Suggested Readings
Castelli-Rosa, Mariana. 2023. “Fantasies of Agelessness and Age Hierarchies in Mary Poppins Returns.” In Aging Experiments - Futures and Fantasies of Old Age, ed. João Paulo Guimarães, 17-32. Bielefeld: Verlag.
Kasper, Daniel. 2024. “You’re Too Focused on Where You’ve Been”: Uncanny Nostalgia in Mary Poppins Returns.” In Gothic Nostalgia: The Uses of Toxic Memory in 21st Century Popular Culture, eds Simon Bacon and Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon, 117–130. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Napper, Lawrence, 2009. “There’s No Place Like London: London Musicals and the Traffic in Souls.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 6, no. 2: 220–231.