Life, Animated
When he fell into silence, movies gave him back his voice
Directed by Roger Ross Williams
Produced by A&E IndieFilms, Motto Pictures
A deeply moving documentary about a father's ingenuity and love in helping his nonverbal autistic son rediscover communication through the gateway of Disney animation.
At three years old, a chatty, energetic little boy named Owen Suskind ceased to speak, disappearing into autism with apparently no way out. Almost four years passed and the only stimuli that engaged Owen were Disney films. Then one day, his father donned a puppet—Iago, the wisecracking parrot from Aladdin—and asked “what’s it like to be you?” And poof! Owen replied, with dialogue from the movie. Life, Animated tells the remarkable story of how Owen found in Disney animation a pathway to language and a framework for making sense of the world.
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