Life, Animated (2016)

Directed by: Roger Ross Williams | 89 minutes | documentary, animation, drama, family, romance | Starring: Jonathan Freeman, Gilbert Gottfried, Alan Rosenblatt, Owen Suskind, Ron Suskind

Once upon a time there was a boy with autism, removed from the world and the people around him, until he found his way back through Disney movies. ‘Life, Animated’, the Oscar-nominated documentary by Roger Ross Williams, shows in an authentic way the consequences autism has on the life of an autist and the people around him or her. The film tells the story of Owen Suskind who started showing symptoms of (severe) autism at the age of 3. He stopped speaking and his motor skills deteriorated badly. His parents and the experts couldn’t do anything, as much as they wanted to. His mother, Cornelia, said, “I’m just gonna hold you so tight and love you so much, that whatever is going on with you will go away.” But unfortunately what this cannot be solved with love. Owen remained lost in his own world, cut off from the people around him.

This changes when at the age of six he suddenly says something to his parents about his older brother Walter. “Walt doesn’t want to grow up, just like Peter Pan and Mowgli.” It turns out that Owen gets his knowledge of and references to the world around him from the Disney animated movies. He knows all the movies by heart and knows how to use Disney dialogues in communicating with other people, especially his family.

Owen is now 23 years old, almost graduated and is going to live on his own. We see in ‘Life, Animated’ how Owen and his family approach this time and the new changes. Images from the present are juxtaposed with images from the past and bits from Disney movies to give a complete picture of Owen’s life. Owen has also written a story about the sidekicks from Disney movies, in which he himself is the ‘protector of sidekicks’. This story is shown in animated fragments throughout the documentary.

It’s clear that Williams (who won an Oscar for the short documentary ‘Music by Prudence’) and Tom Bergmann (cinematographer specializing in documentaries) make a strong team. They know how to best shape a story. Little fuss is made. The images and the people speak for themselves. At times it’s a bit uncomfortable for the viewer (especially the interaction between Owen and his girlfriend Emily evokes this feeling), at other times it’s very touching (Owen’s heartfelt emotions and his passion for Disney). But the end result is above all a beautiful authentic, and very specific, representation of life with autism, that with the help of Disney films a life is filled with family, friends, new opportunities and above all contact with the world around him.

Life won’t be all fun moments, and that’s what ‘Life, Animated’ is all about, but there’s hope for the future. “When I look in the mirror, I see a man ready for the future,” Owen says at a conference on autism. And so we see that in real life there is also a chance of a ‘and they lived happily ever after’. Maybe we should all look at the world from a Disney perspective a little more often.