I went and saw this movie recently and it was very cute and Disney appropriate. It bugs me to hear how they changed aspects of the main character P.L. Travers, played by Emma Thompson. In the movie they portray her as a frigid lonely author but in reality she was much more. In her "Feminist Friday" column in L.A. Weekly, Ali Davis highlights another side of Travers's character:
In reality, Travers was a feisty, stereotype-breaking bisexual - a single mom who adopted a baby in her 40s, studied Zen mediation in Kyoto, and was publishing erotica about her silky underwear 10 years before Walt had sketched his mouse. Now that's a character worth slapping on-screen, instead of this stiff British stereotype determined to steal joy from future generations of children. With her longtime girlfriend and then-adult son erased, this frigid Travers seems like she may not even know how babies are made. Maybe Mary Poppins could sing her a song about it.
Emma Thompson has also acknowledged certain absences concerning her character:
She may have had lesbian relationships. I don’t know if they were sexual relationships, or just companionship, but she was very much in love with men and women. One was a married poet. She was also into fashion and rather vain. She had a good singing voice, and she was an actress. There were many things about her not in the film.
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