With Disney Part of His World, an Autistic Boy Thrives
Plenty of movie fans obsess over a favorite musical or comedy. They re-enact scenes to amuse friends or quote funny bits at parties. But few can claim that a film restored their life.
Owen Suskind can. When he was 3 years old, the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind and his wife Cornelia, regressed into autism. Unable to communicate through speech, the child took refuge in Disney animated movies. One day, while re-watching a scene from “The Little Mermaid” with his family, he suddenly began to repeat something.
No one understood him at first. Then they realized it was a snatch of dialogue from the scene in which the mermaid Ariel barters with the Sea Witch to become human.
“Just your voice” were the words.
The breakthrough is revisited in “Life, Animated,” a new documentary that explores the life of Owen Suskind, now 25, as a happy, independent adult whose immersion in Disney films helped him overcome steep challenges.
“People can see me for who I am, now they do,” said Owen, who joined his father on a recent interview a few hours before the movie played at the Nantucket Film Festival. “I’m an unpolished gem.”
The film, which opens Friday in New York, was made by New York-based director Roger Ross Williams. It won the prize for directing in the U.S. documentary category at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Since then, Owen has begun to enjoy some unexpected celebrity.
“It’s like a rock concert,” said Mr. Williams, describing the scene after a festival screening. “When he comes out, people jump to their feet and they’re cheering. He’s high-fiving people coming down the aisle.”
Mr. Williams became friends with Ron Suskind 15 years ago, when both men worked for ABC News. In 2014, the elder Mr. Suskind published “Life Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism,” which told the story of Owen, his family and those Disney movies.
“I’d been wanting to make a documentary with Ron for a while,” said Mr. Williams, who won a 2010 Academy Award for best short documentary. “When he told me the story, it blew me away.”
Aside from a few flashbacks, the film follows Owen in the year after he leaves the family’s Cambridge, Mass., home to live in his own apartment in an assisted-living complex. Rather than focus on autism, the movie is about coming of age. Owen takes a leadership role at his school, forming a popular “Disney club,” in which other developmentally disabled students share their relationship with movies.
Fittingly, he takes a job at a local multiplex cinema. He experiences the emotional roller-coaster of first love, which prompts his older brother Walter to offer advice on how to kiss a girl.
Owen also holds forth on his fascination with the Disney films—he prefers those that are drawn by hand—and his imaginary role as the defender of all the cartoon sidekicks, part of a complex personal universe that he invented out of all the Disney films.
“It was important to me to get inside Owen’s head, and experience that world as a beautiful place that is complex and rich,” said Mr. Williams, who uses clips from 15 different Disney classics, as well as hand-drawn animation, to illuminate Owen’s world.
“Everything changes,” Cornelia Suskind observes in the film, explaining the deep connection her son experienced with the Disney stories. “That’s the one thing he can hang onto that never changes.”
One of the film’s most poignant sequences shows the adult Owen absorbed by a scene from “Peter Pan,” as Peter engages Captain Hook in a sword fight. The movie cuts to a home movie of a pre-autistic Owen and his father re-enacting the scene in their backyard.
What Ron Suskind calls “affinity therapy” isn’t limited to Disney classics, although animation can connect powerfully because of its exaggerated emotions, color and archetypal characters.
“Folks on the [autism] spectrum use these passions as pathways,” he said. “For a long time, they were viewed as prisons.”
For the elder Mr. Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal writer who currently lectures at Harvard Law School, the film is about the transformative power of art.
“I use these stories as a mirror…into my heart, into my head and to my aspirations,” Owen said.
Before seeing the movie for the first time, Ron Suskind recalled, his son got a little rattled while waiting for an elevator. The men began to discuss the journey of the hero and how, without obstacles, the qualities of the hero never emerge.
“And all the obstacles are in this movie,” Ron Suskind said.
He hasn’t forgotten Owen’s response: “It turns out as me. I emerged.”