Life, Ani­mat­ed

Dis­ney, although a giant, cor­po­rate machine with­in the film indus­try, has his­tor­i­cal­ly been asso­ci­at­ed with cre­at­ing work that teach­es chil­dren valu­able moral lessons. Films like Aladdin, Bam­bi and Peter Pan have enlight­ened a gen­er­a­tion of kids on every­thing from the inevitabil­i­ty of death to the impor­tance of let­ting go of the past. Even though they may offer some good advice, the crush­ing real­i­ty of ​‘grow­ing up’ forces us all to move on from these colour­ful worlds.

This pow­er­ful doc­u­men­tary illus­trates what hap­pens if you nev­er stop liv­ing by the laws of Dis­ney. Roger Ross Williams directs the art­ful­ly told sto­ry of Owen Suskind, a man who dis­cov­ered he was autis­tic at around three years of age. Spend­ing months after his diag­no­sis mute and intro­vert­ed, he grew an affin­i­ty for Disney’s ani­mat­ed out­put, dis­cov­er­ing how the world works in the process. He learned to read and write from sim­ply gaw­ping at screen, and even his first words were a line in The Lit­tle Mer­maid. Along­side inter­views with his fam­i­ly and var­i­ous med­ical experts, Williams uses Dis­ney footage, home video and expres­sion­is­tic orig­i­nal ani­ma­tion to relay Owen’s incred­i­ble bond with cinema.

The film is by no means a Dis­ney puff piece. It reveals that these ani­mat­ed mar­vels are lim­it­ed as tools for per­son­al devel­op­ment. Indeed, Owen still strug­gles with the com­plex­i­ty of real life. His only knowl­edge of roman­tic rela­tion­ships comes from the con­ser­v­a­tive, fam­i­ly-ori­ent­ed images he’s become so famil­iar with. When his broth­er, Walt, asks him about sex­u­al inter­course, Owen finds the sub­ject incred­i­bly hard to compute.

Dis­ney has giv­en him a fan­tas­tic lease of life, but his grasp of real­i­ty is warped. Full of ups and downs, Life, Ani­mat­ed is a thor­ough­ly absorb­ing, evoca­tive sto­ry about a mind that has been both freed and trapped by an art form.