Life, Animated

Life, Animated is a documentary which tells the story of Owen Suskind, who after being diagnosed with autism when he was three years old, became almost mute, verbalising only nonsense words. His family discovered he could connect emotionally and eventually communicate through Disney films, at first quoting them, and eventually developing a full vocabulary. At the time of filming he's 23, and about to graduate from a special needs school and move out from his parents house into his own accommodation.

If a documentary falls flat it's usually through a lack of story, something which I imagine wouldn't be obvious from the outset when embarking on a project like this. While there certainly are dramatic things happening in the movie there is no real story more than anybody's life is a story. It hits the beats it's supposed to; it's sad in the middle, and all hope is lost when his girlfriend dumps him towards the end of the movie, before he gets to go to France and deliver a speech at a big conference (I wondered when watching the movie how much of it was re-sequenced to make the narrative more uplifting), but these things just happen; there's no cause and effect, no change on the part of the main character and no real message. This isn't strange for a documentary, and to expect Hollywood movie style change and insight from someone with moderate autism might be asking too much, but in using the structure and techniques of an uplifting movie, the narrative is at odds with the form.

There are enjoyable parts - I liked the scenes where he's quoting Disney movies and acting them out, it's impressive how well he can mimic the voices. There's a great scene where Disney voice actors show up at his Disney club at school, and they play around reciting scenes and everyone is really happy. The Disney angle is really the hook here and the most interesting thing I got from the movie is how he relates to Disney movies because they express emotion so clearly, being both a Disney fan and someone who has worked with autistic children for years I can totally relate to this. But this hook also drags the film into nonsense. It would have been a great half hour documentary - the hook is really the first half an hour or so and after that it turns into a sequence of moderately interesting scenes pretending to be story, where the filmmakers should have let them be what they were.

There are lots of Disney clips and some original animated scenes  that tell stories that Owen has written, which have a kind of European look and scream 'worth' into your face - but these only attempt to serve an uplifting feeling and a deeper meaning I didn't see. I think the score was biggest contributor to this, it was so generically epic and uplifting it sounded like a corporate video or an American advert where a group of ethnically diverse people turn to the camera in their own close ups and say 'for me ' 'and me' and then in a wide shot they say 'for all of us' at the same time. It's not boring though, I quite enjoyed the movie - perhaps I am more predisposed than most to do so - but I just wished it had toned down the in-your-face upliftyness; the best parts of the movie were the parts that felt like a documentary and focused on the day to day lives of people with moderate autism (albeit in this case a person with autism who has very rich parents), but the desperate schmaltz stops it from being the unflinching slice of autistic life I would've like to have seen.