Of course, this is not the first time that someone has found problems with the original Mary Poppins film. Indeed, our own Anna Fielding drew umbrage with the character of Winifred Banks last year, noting that the suffragette may be “presented as charming, but she’s also portrayed as an absolute scatterbrain”.

“She’s silly and flighty. She’s a bad mother (her children frequently go missing and she doesn’t seem unduly bothered); incapable of running her home despite having three servants (to whom she doesn’t listen, even when they’re trying to hand in their notice); and she lies to her husband about the extent of her political activity (’You know the cause annoys him!’). [And] her feminism is one of the reasons the family needs the ‘practically perfect’ Mary Poppins to step in.”

“Mrs-Banks-as-suffragette in the film version is a product of 1964’s fears about strident women (and, perhaps, an all-male scripting team),” notes Fielding.

You can read her piece, The Problem With Mrs Banks, here.

Image: Getty

Does Disney’s Mary Poppins promote racism and white supremacism?