Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971, G)

Dir: Robert Stevenson, USA, 117mins, 35mm

Adapting the works of another treasured English children’s writer, Mary Norton, Disney’s less familiar (but in many ways superior) follow up to Mary Poppins brought back the craft of many of the earlier film’s on- and behind-the-screen collaborators. The setting is now the Blitz, and early 1940s England; the story revolves around three children evacuated to the care of a plucky village spinster (Angela Lansbury) who reluctantly reveals her witchcraft in order to repel the threat of German invasion. No other preceding Hollywood children’s film so manifested and joyfully test-ran the sense of innate English magical-ness, of an inner spirit of British popular legend, or of nursery room surrealism, that would later be bundled into Rowling’s books and their adaptations.

Imported 35mm print, courtesy of Walt Disney.