'Life, Animated': For one young man, the prison of autism turns out to be a palace
WASHINGTON - When Owen Suskind shows up for an interview to talk about "Life, Animated," the new documentary of which he is the subject, he's stooping under the weight of a backpack stuffed with DVDs of his favorite Disney films.
The 25-year-old, who lives on Cape Cod but grew up in Washington, never travels without an assortment of viewing options. After a lifetime of watching - and re-watching - Disney animations, Owen has, for all intents and purposes, developed a savant's knowledge of their nuance and arcana.
He demonstrates that feat more than once during a conversation that includes the rest of the Suskind family: mother Cornelia, older brother Walt and father Ron, all of whom look on less with awe than with a sense of been-there, seen-that familiarity.
Case in point: When asked whether he has seen the new Disney/Pixar film "Finding Dory" (Owen's capsule review: "not bad"), he launches into a ranking of Disney's best theatrical sequels, putting "The Rescuers Down Under," "Fievel Goes West," "Toy Story 2" (but not 3) and "Fantasia 2000" at the top.
"The only direct-to-video sequels I love," he says, "after happily having seen the first theatrical 'Land Before Time' movie, released in 1988, are its 13 sequels. I would go all the way to the 10th one, from late 2003, and conclude it right there."
Later, Owen spontaneously quotes from one of his favorite films, "The Lion King": "Oh yes, the past can hurt," he says, in the lilting cadence of the mandrill Rafiki. "But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it."
Owen is autistic.
"Life, Animated" is based on Ron Suskind's best-selling 2014 memoir of his son's sudden regression, just shy of his third birthday, into a silent prison, and of his re-emergence years later, once the family discovered that the key to communicating with him was through the language of Disney cartoons. Owen learned to read, Ron says, by poring over the closing credits of his favorite movies.
After winning a string of audience awards at film festivals from San Francisco to Belgium, "Life, Animated" has turned Owen into something of a rock star. According to Ron, his son was greeted with a standing ovation at the Full Frame festival, where Owen took his place at a Q&A after running down the aisle, high-fiving the crowd.
"The film really connects with people," says the film's director, Roger Ross Williams, who was in town for an enthusiastically received screening of the film.
Williams rejects the description of "Life" as a mere autism story, characterizing it instead a "coming-of-age tale" that begins in a year of transition, as Owen is preparing to graduate from a collagelike school in Massachusetts for special-needs students. Unlike Ron's book, which follows what the former Wall Street Journal reporter calls the "lifeboat" of his son's Disney obsession, the film focuses less on the past than on the future - albeit an uncertain one, filled with such unknowns as a new apartment, a new job (in a movie theater, naturally) and a first girlfriend.
Although the ending of "Life" is happy - or at least happy-ish - it differs significantly from a Disney film in that it's still being written.
Much of the film features Owen speaking directly to the camera. He doesn't easily maintain eye contact, so Williams filmed his interviews using an Interrotron, a camera setup invented by filmmaker Errol Morris that allows an interview subject to look into a computer screen when answering questions.
"Owen is the only one in the film who looks directly at the camera," Williams says. "Audiences are always asking me, 'Why am I connecting with Owen in such a more profound way?' I'll ask a question and then play a Disney clip, and he'll interact with that Disney clip. The audience is, in a sense, inside the clip, inside Owen's brain, in a sense. So many disability films are from the outside in."
Williams says he learned that lesson in making his Oscar-winning 2010 short film, "Music by Prudence," about the physically disabled Zimbabwean singer Prudence Mabhena. "When I made that film and first sat down with Prudence in Zimbabwe," the director says, "no one had ever gone into what she was thinking and feeling. 'Life, Animated' was the next level."
The film also features animations of a story written and illustrated by Owen, in which he is a heroic protector of cartoon sidekicks - clearly identifiable as Disney characters - from an evil villain named Fuzzbutch, who blows fog into people's heads. Disney, which published Ron's book under the Kingswell imprint, has maintained what Ron calls an "arm's length embrace" of the film, allowing generous use of its clips without offering advice on the direction of the film.
Although "Life" is a celebration of the healing power of myth - specifically, Disney myth - the documentary includes a comment by Owen's brother, Walt, that underscores the limitations of a nearly all-Disney cultural diet when it comes to the subject of a young man's nascent sexuality. Maybe, Walt speculates - less cynically than with brutal honesty - Owen needs to watch some "Disney porn." (And, yes, that's a thing, albeit unauthorized.)
Ron alternately calls those DVDs that Owen carries around, as he has at every film festival since Sundance, a "tool kit" and a "road map." It's one that has served both Owen, in learning how to decipher the complex code of emotion, and his family, who, upon peering into what they thought was the prison of their son's mind, found a palace.
But there's a vast, uncharted and scary world outside that palace. Yes, Disney gave the Suskinds a road map, Williams says, but "it only goes so far."