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e d i t i o n 4 , 2 0 1 8 | c g w 3 1 ticexpialidocious! performance of the actors and unaware that what they are looking at is a big CG creation behind them," he explains. "That's sort of the first level and a very im- portant part of the movie. There is a lot of that going on that you are not supposed to be aware of." Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic Johnson points out that there's nat- urally a lot of "fantastical stuff" going on in the film since Mary Poppins is, well, magic. "There are various musical numbers where Mary and the kids go into these completely fantastical CG worlds," he says. There's a number where they are traveling through a magical underwater kingdom. "That was fun; we were literally creating an entire CG ocean," he says. For the sequence, the artists created sort of a whole new kind of coral system. Every strand of coral and every bit of kelp is moving. Every little anemone that's popping out of the coral is breathing, and there are fish that are feeding on the little bits of coral and swimming. "All kinds of stuff are layered into the shots," says Johnson. "It's all really huge amounts of CG, but it's not just like, 'Hey, look at this amazing CG stuff,' but it's just the environment that Mary and the kids find themselves in." Once Marshall and his team decided to employ the hand-drawn techniques of classic Disney films, some of the top animators from Pixar and Walt Disney Animation came out of retirement just to be involved with the project. They created the animation/live-action sequence. "We were all incredibly excited to bring this unique art form back to life," says Marshall. "Having every single frame hand-drawn by great Disney/Pix- ar artists has been a once-in-a-lifetime thrill for all of us." "The animated sequence is obviously what comes to mind when you think of Mary Poppins," agrees Johnson. "The carousel, the penguins…. We obviously needed to go there, too. We properly went old school and worked with many of the original animators who came out of retirement to work on it. I mean, it's Mary Poppins, so why wouldn't you? We were literally back to animation stands where people were drawing with pencils. It was proper, traditional old school. It was a world that would have been very familiar to Walt Disney walking through it in the '60s. It was a delight." According to Johnson, Marshall's mu- sical theater and Broadway background lent itself well to how the visual effects played out in the film. "He stages a lot of the big numbers like he's doing a Broad- way show. So, you will have Mary Poppins and Jack dancing down an animated magical staircase with penguins and ev- erything, and rather than do a three-sec- ond take, we're running a full, six-minute MANY ARTISTS CAME OUT OF RETIREMENT TO WORK ON THE FILM.