Life, Animated earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature, a category that also includes an entry from my employer, the 7.5-hour O.J.: Made in America, widely expected to win the award. While I wouldn’t put the two in the same league, I did enjoy Life, Animated (which is free for Amazon Prime members) for its portrayal of a young, high-functioning, autistic adult as a real person with personality and the same hopes and fears as most of the rest of us – not as someone to be pitied or shut away.
Owen Suskind’s story is a peculiar one: at age 3, his autism came on suddenly and he lost all verbal communication skills and even saw regression in gross motor skills. He spoke only in gibberish for at least a year, before his parents discovered that he was able to repeat a line from The Little Mermaid – coincidentally (or not) one about Ariel giving up her voice to Ursula. Over the coming years, his parents were able to use his love of Disney films and ability to memorize huge chunks of dialogue to re-form his verbal communication skills, succeeding to the point that he was able to return to school and eventually graduate from a high school program for kids with special needs. (Disney, my ultimate employer, granted these producers the rights to include a lot of footage from Disney films and to use the likenesses of many Disney characters.)
Owen is an unusual success story among autistic children, and there’s no specific reason to believe that, say, Disney films will unlock every kid whose brain is ‘trapped’ by autism. I would imagine he’s a favorite of researchers both because he did largely come out of the fog and because he can articulate so clearly what’s happening to him. He has a prodigious memory and a broad vocabulary (sometimes in a humorous way, because his speech is stiffly formal, but always right), so he can talk to his parents, his therapists, and here the camera about what it felt like to be four years old and unable to understand anything anyone was saying, or to explain how bullies nearly caused him to shut down emotionally while a teenager. But one of you asked me on Twitter if I thought it insinuated that this might be a cure or treatment for other kids who experience that sudden onset of autism and lose their verbal skills; I really didn’t think so, but then again, I’m not a parent grasping for hope because my child is autistic.
(Also worth noting: Vaccines do not cause autism.)
Instead of trying to tell a sweeping story like ESPN’s OJ documentary or Ava DuVernay’s The 13th, which I just finished today, Life, Animated is just a slice of life and a portrait of one family – and the love and support of his parents and his older brother form a huge part of Owen’s story. I didn’t get any greater message out of it than that we should view people like Owen (and some of his friends whom we meet along the way) as fully-formed people with lives worth living. It might make you a little more compassionate the next time you meet a “strange” person out in public, or perhaps it’ll make you rethink what it means for someone to be “on the spectrum.” At one point, Owen’s parents ask what it means to have a meaningful life, and if Owen is happy and makes others happy, isn’t that good enough? We should all hope to accomplish so much.