Autism, animated

Disney movies don’t always have such socially redeeming values and intense personal impact on a person’s life. Owen Suskind’s profound autism made him uncommunicative for years as a child. His love of animated movies never wavered, however.

One day, his parents Ron and Cornelia discovered that he could actually use those very movies to relate to the world. He memorized them and played them over in his mind. Those lines of dialogue then played integral roles in helping him to explain his own feelings and behaviours to them. The breakthrough moment was when Ron put on a hand puppet of Iago, the parrot sidekick to Jafar, the villainous vizier in Aladdin. Talking in Iago’s voice, the father was finally able to have a conversation with the young boy.

And that’s when the whole family started to understand how to use Disney films to get through to Owen. They watched movies together and replayed scenes together. This continued practice eventually helped the boy to regain his ability to communicate freely.

Owen, in turn, took his love and devotion of these movies to create his own place in the world. He would endlessly draw sketches of all of the sidekick characters, inserting them into his own story about family, relationships, and love.

There’s a good reason that this was the winner of the Best Documentary (Directing) award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Even if you don’t have a person on the autism spectrum in your life, this documentary offers powerful proof about the humanity that exists deep within the seemingly fathomless well that autistic people live in.

Life, Animated follows Owen and his family as they reflect on his younger years, starting with the moment he disappeared. Ron Suskind used that phrase to describe the three-year-old boy who just wasn’t the same any more. Owen grows up with a number of struggles with school and relationships, but eventually graduates and moves out on his own. He becomes eloquent about his autism even, and the filmmakers capture his speech to an autism conference in France.

The film is augmented with animations by French production company Mac Guff to great effect, demonstrating not only Owen’s interior psychological life but also bringing his sidekick characters into motion.

Life, Animated started its limited run at Metro Cinema last night and it ends on Wednesday with a special sensory-friendly screening, meaning that the sound will play at a reduced volume and the house lights will be half-lit, so that people with sensory sensitivities can enjoy the movie better.