BEFORE: This Oscar-nominated documentary got my attention a couple of years ago, so it spent some time on the back-up watch list (the one for films where I don't have a copy myself, but I could probably get access to it via streaming services or, in this case, an Academy screener). However, the lack of a large cast of well-known actors prevented me from working it in, until now, with Gilbert Gottfried carrying over from "The Last Laugh".
THE PLOT: A coming-of-age story about a boy and his family who overcame great challenges by turning Disney animated movies into a language to express love, loss, kinship and brotherhood.
AFTER: Surprisingly, Gilbert makes a full appearance in this film, and not just in animation as the voice of Iago from the movie "Aladdin". We meet Owen Suskind, the young man overcoming autism as he is getting ready to make the transition from living with his parents and attending classes designed to prepare him to live and work on his own, and we learn that he'd established a "Disney Movie Club", a regular screening where he and other people with special needs could get together and watch and discuss these animated classics. Jonathan Freeman, the voice of "Jafar", was a special guest at one screening, where he read lines from the classic film, and Mr. Gottfried also appeared as a surprise. (One suspects the documentary filmmakers may have intervened here to create a "moment" for their film.) But it was exciting to see the wonder that his unannounced arrival caused in the film's subject.
This is a story about a boy who developed autism at a young age, and for several years spoke only gibberish, who was basically living in a world of his own. But one day his father was able to communicate with him by using a puppet of the Iago character, and they discovered that they could reach him through the Disney films, as the young boy had watched them all, memorized them and internalized them. And much like Peter Pan, Owen was resisting all efforts to make him grow up (who can blame him, it's great to be a kid...) but eventually, by using lessons from the Disney films, he was able to express his feelings, attend high school and get a job (in a movie theater, no less).
I might be bringing too much personal knowledge to the table on this one, because I watched all the Disney films when I was a kid (though there weren't as many of them then), even, God help me, "Bedknobs and Broomsticks". They were, in fact the only films that I was allowed to see, up until the age of 8, when my grandfather took me to see the 1976 version of "King Kong", which my mother was sure would corrupt me. (She was sort of right, "Star Wars" came along the next year, and I sort of never looked back...). Also, I used to work in movie theaters, before I got hired by animation studios, though the cartoons I've worked on are definitely not Disney material. And I've got a nephew who's probably somewhere on the spectrum, though in recent years I've had engaging conversations with him about "Star Wars", since in some ways he knows just as much about those movies as I do.
I don't fully understand autism (who does?) but I was a kid once, and if I loved something, I wanted to know all about it, memorize it and internalize it, whether it was a Star Wars movie or a funny Monty Python sketch or a "choose your own adventure" book. I took apart my toys and put them back together again, and agonized over jigsaw puzzles that were missing a piece. I was fairly anti-social and also endured bullying, and probably had a lot of trouble expressing my emotions and dealing with things, so I may have checked off many of the boxes associated with the condition - but I excelled at schoolwork, read puzzle magazines in my spare time, and I don't know, kept aware and learned some social skills - still, I won't say I'm "normal" (because who is?). On my last trip to visit my parents, I encountered my cousin's daughter, who was shy and told me that she has trouble meeting new people, so I told her that I'm just loud, but not mean. And when she found out I worked in animation, she started reciting a lot of points that she'd obviously learned from watching the "making of" segments on some animated DVD, which sounded like they came straight from a production meeting, like "Make sure you have a strong female character" and "Have several turning points in your story". Holy crap, I thought, in 30 years she'll be a successful studio executive.
So, with this background knowledge of both Disney films and child development, tonight I introduce a new feature to the Movie Year. Now that my NITPICK POINTS are practically a household name (they are, right?) it's time to bring on the Hastily Drawn Conclusion.
HASTILY DRAWN CONCLUSION #1 - Disney animated films cause autism.
(DISCLAIMER: Hastily Drawn Conclusions are not intended to be taken seriously. They are meant to make a larger point, often based on an ironic or comical view of the world, and are intended for entertainment purposes only. No malice or liability shall result from use of the HDC and please discontinue using if you feel dizzy, lightheaded, or overly litigious. Ignore the HDC if you are pregnant, trying to conceive, or are an overprotective parent.)
I'm being facetious, of course, but think about it - Owen was a normal kid and seemed to interact well with his parents, and then they watched all the Disney films together and boom, autism. This is, more or less, the same argument used by the anti-vaxxers that's putting kids at risk of getting measles right now. "My son was doing fine, then he got vaccinated, and now he's moody and withdrawn..." Well, at least he won't get measles now. Seriously, though, I don't have all the answers here, in most cases I don't even know what the questions are. Is the cause of autism physical, chemical or emotional? Has the rise of the condition been caused by some recent environmental development or has it always been there, and we've just gotten better at diagnosing it? Air pollution, PCBs, smoking, drinking - you'd think that if there were a common cause factor we would have landed on it by now, but instead it's one of those problems like climate change that seems too big for us to prevent or even process.
But think about this - why does the Disney corporations keep their classic films in "The Disney Vault"? Why wouldn't they release all of their films on VHS or DVD at the same time for so many years, what were they afraid of? What would have happened to society if all of those classic films were on the market at the SAME TIME? I think they know more than they're letting on, it couldn't possibly be that they didn't want those films competing with each other, or that by limiting their availability they were creating an artificial demand for their own product, that's too horrible to contemplate. "Available for a limited time only, during which we'll sell millions of copies before putting that classic film back in the vault, to be replaced by another classic film that will sell millions of copies during this same limited time-frame next year." OR, maybe they're worried about wide-spread autism right after they release all of the films, and then we'd all figure it out and the jig would be up. Which brings me to:
HASTILY DRAWN CONCLUSION #2 - Disney animated films cause arrested development.
This one's got some legs, I think, because in this documentary they point out that Owen is not ready for an adult relationship because his main influence is Disney films, where the lead characters kiss at the end and live "happily ever after" which bears little resemblance to what occurs in the real world. Owen doesn't much about French kissing or sex, merely because those things don't happen in Disney films. When his girlfriend breaks up with him, he's devastated, because it doesn't match what Disney films have told him over and over about relationships - that there's one true love for each person, and when they meet there may be trials to go through, but once the villain is defeated, it's smooth sailing. But in real life there's no "one true love" for anyone, you can meet someone and form a workable pairing that can last decades, but it's not a guarantee, you've got to keep constantly working on it and maintaining it, or it could wither and dissolve. And if it does, you can meet someone new and form another workable pairing, same deal. There's just no divorce or irreconcilable differences in a Disney film, and very little illness, death or Electoral College upsets, either, it's a magical place that lulls people into a false sense of security. Children who believe in this world are ill-prepared to handle the struggles and challenges of the adult world.
The Disney world is sort of like a vacation, perhaps to Disneyland. You can have a great time there for a week, but you also have to acknowledge that your parents have to work hard the other 51 weeks of the year in order to have some extra money to pay for that week. Sorry, that's reality, and the quicker kids learn that, the better off they'll be. Then maybe they'll be ready to work hard when they're adults, instead we have a society of twenty-somethings who want to be on vacation all the time, so they have jobs like "social media influencer" and "party consultant" or "Head of the EPA" where they don't really DO anything and wouldn't even know where to begin if they had to. Let's call those "Disney jobs", for lack of a better term.
Look, I know what I'm talking about, I got off the Disney movie carousel when I was 9, and I didn't really come back until I was an adult, and could see things more clearly. Many adults also come back to Disney films when they have kids, and I believe they have a responsibility to put these films into perspective, give their kids a proper background so they realize the films don't reflect reality, that they are all fairy tales in the end. But they don't do that, they just plop the kids down in front of the TV, and then they've got 90 minutes of peace, they can have a coffee or an alcoholic beverage, read the newspaper or have sex or just be alone with their thoughts without catering to a screaming child. I get that, but really, context is everything, and these films need to be placed into the proper context.
HASTILY DRAWN CONCLUSION #3: Disney films are an addictive substance.
This one works on several levels, because Disney somehow cracked the code over what kids want to see in films, by taking parts of fairy tales, or novels like "Tarzan" or "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and clearing out all the parts they felt kids shouldn't learn about or wouldn't be able to understand, and then dressed them up with bright colors and silly voices. This is the "Spoonful of Sugar" mentality that makes the medicine go down, but a spoonful of sugar also brings on juvenile diabetes, if you think about it. In high school kids might learn what the REAL ending of Victor Hugo's novel is, and be very shocked, saying, "Hey, that's not the way the Disney movie ends!" Yeah, but it's more realistic in the novel, isn't it? Everybody dies, so welcome back to the world, kids.
They used to come closer in the old days - like, what happened to Bambi's mother? But since then, it's been mostly sweetness and light, constantly reinforcing that little part of everyone's brain that leads them, falsely, to believe that everything's going to work out in the end. It's basically porn for kids, that same hit of endorphins that will require larger and larger doses after continual use, and I think the sooner that they go cold turkey and kick the habit, the better off they'll be in the long run. If you keep feeding the Beast within, he's only going to keep growing bigger and stronger.
I don't have children, but if I did, I would try to find the right time to transition them to other forms of movies (like, I don't know, maybe independently animated features?) - stories that could better prepare them for the harsh realities of life. The idea of taking two or more kids out into the world to see a movie in a theater that's full of other kids and their parents is my own personal nightmare - I want to see "Toy Story 4" in a couple weeks, but I'm going to pick a day and time when there won't be so many kids there, like on a Monday or Wednesday night. I have very little need to see the remakes of "Dumbo", "Aladdin" or "The Lion King" when there are already animated versions of these movies - Disney's double-dipping by remaking their own films, so I think that proves that creatively, the company is already at a dead-end. They're forced to rip THEMSELVES off now, because they've already been strip-mining all of Western literature for the last 8 decades. They've become the snake eating its own tail, and then what happens after that? And I ask this as a Disney stockholder, mind you.
I recognized a couple of names in the credits of "Life, Animated" related to the animated section here, there's a film-within-a-film based on Owen Suskind's stories that's sort of a team-up featuring sidekicks from various Disney films. Between that and all the clips used from Disney films, it's really a miracle that this film got made and released the way it is. But I suppose suing an autistic teen for copyright infringement would reflect back negatively on DisneyCorp in the end. Very shrewd.
Also starring Owen Suskind, Ron Suskind, Cornelia Suskind, Walter Suskind, Alan Rosenblatt, Emily Jathas, Jonathan Freeman, and the voices of Matthew Broderick (last seen in "Addicted to Love"), James Earl Jones (last seen in "The Comedians").
RATING: 5 out of 10 corporate lawyers (remember, guys, free speech is protected...)
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