Disney’s first feature film to be nominated for the Best Film Oscar (it, Becket, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Zorba the Greek all lost out to My Fair Lady), their adaptation of the first of P.L. Travers’ series of novels about a magical nanny was the biggest box office hit of the year and has remained one of the company’s most beloved films of all time. There’s little here in the way of story (an arc about the redemption of a strict and emotionally distant Edwardian parent occasionally surfaces) but for once it doesn’t really matter much. At 2 hours and 20 minutes it is overlong (but what would you cut from it? What could you stand to lose?) it motors along powered by Robert Stevenson’s lovely direction, Disney’s best collection of songs yet and some energetic dance routines choreographer by Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood.

What plot there is plays out over a few days in Edwardian London during the spring of 1910. All banker George Banks (David Tomlinson) expects from his household at 17 Cherry Tree Lane is that it be as ordered and well-disciplined as his place of employment. But wife Winifred (Glynis Johns) is busy with the suffragette movement and his two precocious children, Jane (Karen Dotrice) and Michael (Matthew Garber), have just driven off the latest in a long line of nannies (Elsa Lanchester) with their wayward behaviour. Watching over the chaos from her place on a cloud high above the city is the enigmatic Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews) who descends on her umbrella to take up the post of the children’s new nanny. She starts to show them her magical powers, including the ability to clean up their very messy nursery with a click of her fingers and soon the children have grown very attached to her. They meet Bert (Dick Van Dyke), a sort of itinerant jack of all trades and transports them all into one of his chalk paintings to a world of animated creatures. Later they meet Bert’s Uncle Albert (Ed Wynn) who laughs so hard that he floats up to the ceiling, learn a new word, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, see an old woman (Jane Darwell) who sells crumbs to feed the birds outside St Paul’s Cathedral and wreak havoc at their father’s bank. It all proves too much for the harassed Mr Banks – but is there still time to show him the simple joys of lying kites and that not everything needs to run like clockwork?

Let’s tackle the elephant in the room first. Yes, Dick Van Dyke’s “gor blimey guv’nor” accent is terrible and has been widely mocked across the years, even by Van Dyke himself – when, in 1968, while he was shooting Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, he claims to have been offered the role of James Bond by producer Cubby Broccoli. “Have you heard [my British accent]?” quipped Van Dyke. “Oh, that’s right – forget it!” replied Broccoli. It may be apocryphal or entirely made up, but it demonstrates how widespread the joshing of Van Dyke and his accent was even just four years after the film was released. But in fairness, it’s also now such a well-loved (if still widely mocked) part of the film that we’d be lost without it.

And besides, Van Dyke is so likable, charming and irrepressible throughout that it’s hard to care that much. He exudes energy at every turn but never more so than in the breath-taking Step in Time routine which sees him and his fellow chimney sweeps cavorting acrobatically across the London rooftops. Julie Andrews is, of course, practically perfect in every way in the title role and the supporting cast of very familiar British faces and voices – Tomlinson, Johns, Lanchester, Hermione Baddeley, Arthur Treacher, Reginald Owen and many others) are terrific. Even the kids are likably roguish, and, unlike the saccharine sweet youthful protagonists of other Disney films, their precociousness is genuinely appealing.

An animation unit, directed by old Disney hand Hamilton S. Luske, takes Disney’s merging of animation and live-action, that they’d tried out in their package films and Song of the South (1946), to whole new levels here in the lengthy scene of Mary and the others cavorting through an animated fantasy land. It’s a remarkable, if entirely self-indulgent, sequence that improves on previous experiments in every way and would only be matched by Disney’s subsequent attempts at the same sort of thing in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Elsewhere, the effects are a variable bunch (some of the back projections are glaringly obvious), some aging better than others, but it’s all impressive enough to carry you through even the rougher moments.

It may all be episodic, but when the episodes are this entertaining, does that really matter? There are plenty of eccentric-bordering-on-the-surreal moments to catch the eye – a sudden gust of wind blows a long line of sour-faced nannies down Cherry Tree Lane and into the distance, the whole of London is rendered as a fairy story setting where everything is spotlessly clean and even the pollution is benign, helping Mary and co climb higher to get a breath-taking view of the sunset and Bert is revealed to be the original hunt saboteur in the fantasy world.

After far too many animated features with only the odd song here and there that lingers in the memory, it’s a treat to finally reach Mary Poppins which is packed to the rafters with unforgettable gems (Spoonful of Sugar, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Feed the Birds, Chim Chim Cheree, Jolly Holiday, every one a classic). Even at the very last knockings, when most films would have used up all their best tunes, Mary Poppins still has Let’s Go Fly a Kite up its sleeve. Disney had worked with songwriters Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman on The Sword in the Stone (1963), but nothing they did there came even close to the quality of tunes they penned for Mary Poppins.

Truly memorable earworms, fun effects, knockout performances, exhilarating dance routines… Is it any wonder that Mary Poppins has remained one of Disney’s most popular films? Yes, it’s too long but it’s never dull (again, what would you take out?) and even Dick Van Dyke’s accent has somehow become oddly endearing over time. It reigned supreme at the box office in 1964 and 1974 and 1980 re-issues were equally lucrative. Indeed, it earned so much money that its profits helped Disney to finance the construction of Walt Disney World Monorail System. The story is thin to the point of barely being there at all but just soak up those gorgeous visuals (photographed by Edward Colman and beautifully edited by Cotton Warburton), sing along to the songs and enjoy the very mild anarchy that occasionally erupts.

A very belated sequel, Mary Poppins Returns, was released in 2018, directed by Rob Marshall with Emily Blunt in the title role and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Jack, Bert’s apprentice. Van Dyke turned up again as Mr Dawes Jr, the retired chairman of Fidelity Fiduciary Bank – he played Dawes Sr here under unconvincing old-age make-up and, initially at least, using the anagrammatic pseudonym Navckid Keyd. The making of the film, and Disney’s fractious relationship with Travers, was charted in the film Saving Mr. Banks (2013).