Movie Review: 'Life, Animated'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Eh...what's up, doc?
If the word, "documentary," continues to suggest cerebral subject matter and dry information and talking-head interviews and pointed preachiness, then here's a movie to demonstrate just how much more animated – literally – they actually can be.
Life, Animated is an emotionally engaging and richly rewarding documentary about the coming-of-age of an autistic child and the way that his passion for Disney cartoons unlocks the key to his language skills.
Owen Suskind is his name and he's 25, about to move into his own condo in a group home, when we start looking back at his life.
But when he was three, he suddenly lost many of his newly acquired motor skills and withdrew into himself, becoming silent and no longer speaking to his heartbroken parents or his older brother.
He was diagnosed with autism.
"Someone kidnapped our son" was the way his dad, Ron, put it.
What finally unlocked his ability to communicate with his loved ones, about a year into his silence, was his obsession with the characters in feature-length animated Disney flicks that he enjoyed spending his time watching.
Owen's father is Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Wall Street Journal who discovered that Owen wasn't just watching beloved animated movies, but was assimilating them and memorizing them and quoting from them word for word.
Ron's memoir, Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, provides a spine of sorts for the film.
The Suskinds realized, happily and gratefully, that they could get through to Owen by adopting the voices and dialogue of characters from such classics as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pinocchio, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, and Peter Pan.
Life, Animated was directed by Roger Ross Williams (God Loves Uganda) – the first African-American director to win an Oscar, which was for a documentary short -- who happens to be a friend of the Suskind family.
As Owen graduates high school and moves out on his own as an independent adult, he continues to extract life lessons from the animated films in the Disney vaults.
Director Williams shares this with us by including clips from the familiar movies and watching the way Owen uses insights from the scripts to shape his perceptions. His film doesn't suggest that Disney movies will do the trick for everyone facing the challenges of autism, but that reaching out to loved ones wherever they happen to be at the time might be easier if the equivalent of Owen's favorite movies can be found in other lives and households.
In other words, what are sometimes seen as unproductive obsessions in autistic youngsters might perhaps serve as pathways to more productive communication.
The power of cinema is certainly demonstrated along the way, but this especially uplifting true tale is nothing if not hopeful, not only for folks dealing with the autism spectrum, but for all parents worried about getting through to their children, the aspect here that lends the film remarkable universality.
So we'll repeat 3 stars out of 4. The documentary, Life, Animated, is a warmly inspirational drawing of an animated life.
