Sound in 'Saving Mr Banks'

Sound plays a significant role when it comes to films as the sound is a way of communication between the audience and characters and helps to bring the film to life, along with engaging the audience with the environment of the film and intriguing them too. Bordwell and Thompson suggest that 'our visual attention is accompanied by aural attention'/ 'the engagement of hearing opens the posibility of what the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein called "synchronization of senses"- making a single rhythm or expressive quality unify both image and sound.' Within the film ‘Saving Mr Banks’, based on the story of P.L Travers (author of Mary Poppins)  a combination of diegetic and non-diegetic sound is used to create verisimilitude for the film. We are first introduced to the sound at the beginning of the film with the iconic music of ‘Chim Chim Che-ree’ (piano instrumental) which makes it clear that the film is based around the origins of the story of Mary Poppins. Diegetic sound is present also in the character’s speech: in particular the different accents and the way the characters speak: the American accent, the English accent and Australian accent. This could represent P.L Travers journey through these key countries too as she reminisces about her childhood in Australia where the music in the background is soft which creates a sense of nostalgia, then whilst she is England the only sounds that are present are speech between characters and the noises made by other props however, right at the very end, string instruments can be heard which follow through to one of the main scores (video below) which changes the eerie atmosphere into something slighlty more cheery. Finally in America (Los Angeles), where jazz is played in the background (non-diegetic) to capture the environment of 1960s America, especially the Hollywood feel. The sound that is used within the film, whether it be diegetic or non-diegetic, allows the audience to embrace the journey of the character and is a partial voice for the film along with helping to carry the film through.

Reference for quote in bold:
 http://qmplus.qmul.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/162242/mod_resource/content/2/Bordwell%2C%20David%20and%20Thompson%2C%20Kristin%2C%20Sound%20in%20the%20cinema.doc