SCREENED AT THE 2016 CHICAGO CRITICS FILM FESTIVAL: I'm not even going to pretend to be objective in this review, as this documentary film struck so many chords with me on so many different levels that at some point during my viewing of it at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, I just completely abandoned viewing it from a critical eye and went on this real-life journey that reminded me of my own life in ways that were both cathartic and occasionally uncomfortable.
I have been officially diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome since I was five years old, which for those of you who don't know, is a disorder on the mild end of the autism spectrum and is "characterized by higher than average intellectual ability coupled with impaired social skills and restrictive, repetitive patterns of interest and activities." Because of this, for the first few years of my schooling life I would barely talk to anybody; rather, I would get in my head and flesh out stories that I would usually act out with my Thomas the Tank Engine toys. My stories were mostly inspired by random things I would pick up on from watching TV and, of course, Disney movies (my two favorites as a kid being The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast). While part of me is thankful for the fact that I've blessed with the ability to see the world in a unique way and discover telling stories through film as an outlet for creative expression, I also realize the setbacks in my early development, that I was so in-my-own-head as a child and so obsessed with the portrait of love in those Disney movies that I began to adopt that romantic, idealized, and fantastical idea of love as my outlook. I thought that two people sharing a kiss was the most beautiful thing ever, and I couldn't wait until I could kiss someone myself. But as I got older, this outlook on love and romance became dangerous and resulted in several crushing blows of rejection and even some lost friendships. It resulted in me learning that what I struggle with is psychologically refered to as "limerence," which is something I've been seeking help for and will hopefully try to get better at working with.
But anyway, over the last few years I have come to greatly resent Disney for their portrayal of love and romance, and I do believe that it is having a negative effect on some children that watch them (I still hear stories now about young kids who literally cry when they don't get their "crush," something that I'm all too familiar with). But in Life, Animated, Disney movies quite literally give a young boy named Owen Suskind his voice. At the age of three, Owen, who at the time had been seen as a normal happy young boy with an active imagination, just stopped talking. After many doctor's appointments, it turned out that Owen had autism. His parents, understandably, were baffled and didn't know what to do to help him. One of the few things that they could still do as a family was watch the Disney animated classics that Owen always loved, and it was through this that they found a way to communicate with him (there's a reason I'm not getting more specific, and that's because you have to see this movie).
Much like the other brilliant documentary that I discovered at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, Nuts!, this doesn't simply rely on talking heads to tell its amazing real-life story. Rather, in keeping with the spirit of the Disney movies at the center of Owen Suskind's life, director Roger Ross Williams utilizes select scenes of animation and clips from various Disney animated classics to allow us to get inside Owen's head and truly come to understand how he sees the world. For example, at one point in the film, he writes a short story called "The Land of the Lost Sidekicks" and casts himself as the protector of Disney sidekicks (including Muchu from Mulan and the Genie from Aladdin) and Williams beautifully brings this story to life with an animated sequence that's as convincing as any Disney animated short played before one of their own films. It really brought to mind how I visualized my stories as a kid (and occasionally do now).
But easily the most gut-punching part of this film, and the one that elevates it beyond the sappy, cutesy after-school-special documentary that it could have been, is how it juxtoposes fly-on-the-wall glimpses into the life of 23-year-old Owen with the fanciful partly-animated Disney-focused sequences. At twenty-three, Owen had just finished school, landed a job at a local Regal multiplex, and was moving out of his parents' house and into a Cape Cod assisted-living facility. However, he was also having to learn some adult lessons that he didn't necessarily get a full grasp on through Disney films. One part of the movie that hit particularly close to home for me was when (spoiler) his girlfriend Emily breaks up with him for being too obsessive toward her. He takes this hard, because of how much she meant to him and how their relationship was his idea of the "true love" he had seen in countless Disney movies. He never does entirely get over this breakup, but it further reminded me of how much I had personally come to resent Disney films for their fantastical portrayal of "true love." Perhaps the most painful scene in the film to watch comes during this part, when Owen's mother has to comfort him when he cries about how it's "not fair" that he has to suffer through the loss of this girl who meant so much to him. His mother then invokes The Hunchback of Notre Dame as an example of a Disney film in which the hero doesn't get the girl (this is one of the few Disney films I've never seen) in an attempt to get Owen to come to terms with this.
This is the type of honesty I really wish more films would dare to come close to (I get that this is a documentary, but still) and I think kids need to be able to understand that the idea of true love in Disney films is not reality and that they're going to get rejected by their crushes most of the time. This is something I still have to grapple with to this day and to see Owen have to go through a similar thing in this film was a profound thing to witness. The film is supposedly going to be getting a Chicago release on July 8, and I honestly think it should be required viewing for every child old enough to go to school (it is rated PG) as it is a brilliant portrayal of not only a child grappling with autism and the healing power of film but also that not everything you see in films should be taken as gospel. And until Disney films decide that they want to reflect reality a little more with their "happily-ever-after" endings, I guess it's going to have to take documentaries like Life, Animated to balance those endings with reality. And maybe that's not such a bad thing as long as kids are able to see them.
Much like the other brilliant documentary that I discovered at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, Nuts!, this doesn't simply rely on talking heads to tell its amazing real-life story. Rather, in keeping with the spirit of the Disney movies at the center of Owen Suskind's life, director Roger Ross Williams utilizes select scenes of animation and clips from various Disney animated classics to allow us to get inside Owen's head and truly come to understand how he sees the world. For example, at one point in the film, he writes a short story called "The Land of the Lost Sidekicks" and casts himself as the protector of Disney sidekicks (including Muchu from Mulan and the Genie from Aladdin) and Williams beautifully brings this story to life with an animated sequence that's as convincing as any Disney animated short played before one of their own films. It really brought to mind how I visualized my stories as a kid (and occasionally do now).
But easily the most gut-punching part of this film, and the one that elevates it beyond the sappy, cutesy after-school-special documentary that it could have been, is how it juxtoposes fly-on-the-wall glimpses into the life of 23-year-old Owen with the fanciful partly-animated Disney-focused sequences. At twenty-three, Owen had just finished school, landed a job at a local Regal multiplex, and was moving out of his parents' house and into a Cape Cod assisted-living facility. However, he was also having to learn some adult lessons that he didn't necessarily get a full grasp on through Disney films. One part of the movie that hit particularly close to home for me was when (spoiler) his girlfriend Emily breaks up with him for being too obsessive toward her. He takes this hard, because of how much she meant to him and how their relationship was his idea of the "true love" he had seen in countless Disney movies. He never does entirely get over this breakup, but it further reminded me of how much I had personally come to resent Disney films for their fantastical portrayal of "true love." Perhaps the most painful scene in the film to watch comes during this part, when Owen's mother has to comfort him when he cries about how it's "not fair" that he has to suffer through the loss of this girl who meant so much to him. His mother then invokes The Hunchback of Notre Dame as an example of a Disney film in which the hero doesn't get the girl (this is one of the few Disney films I've never seen) in an attempt to get Owen to come to terms with this.
This is the type of honesty I really wish more films would dare to come close to (I get that this is a documentary, but still) and I think kids need to be able to understand that the idea of true love in Disney films is not reality and that they're going to get rejected by their crushes most of the time. This is something I still have to grapple with to this day and to see Owen have to go through a similar thing in this film was a profound thing to witness. The film is supposedly going to be getting a Chicago release on July 8, and I honestly think it should be required viewing for every child old enough to go to school (it is rated PG) as it is a brilliant portrayal of not only a child grappling with autism and the healing power of film but also that not everything you see in films should be taken as gospel. And until Disney films decide that they want to reflect reality a little more with their "happily-ever-after" endings, I guess it's going to have to take documentaries like Life, Animated to balance those endings with reality. And maybe that's not such a bad thing as long as kids are able to see them.
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