Life, Animated

Movie
German title	Life, Animated
Original title	Life, Animated
Country of production	United States
original language	English
Publishing year	2016
length	92 minutes
Age rating	FSK 0
Rod
Director	Roger Ross Williams
script	Roger Ross Williams, ; David Teague
production	Roger Ross Williams, ; Julie Goldman
music	Dylan Stark , ; Todd Griffin
camera	Thomas Bergmann
cut	David Teague
occupation
	Owen Suskind; Ron Suskind; Walter Suskind; Jonathan Freeman; Gilbert Gottfried; Alan Rosenblatt;

Life, Animated is an American documentary directed by Roger Ross Williams , which premiered on January 23, 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival . The film tells the story of Owen Suskind , who was a normal boy until the age of three but suddenly developed a form of autism and is based on the book of the same name that his father Ron Suskind wrote about it.

Plot / content

Owen Suskind is about to leave his parents' apartment and move into his own apartment in a supervised dormitory and get his first job. What was completely normal for others was previously unimaginable for him, because the 23-year-old was a talkative, completely normal boy until the age of three, but then suddenly he developed a form of autism . Owen withdrew into himself, stopped speaking, and his parents lost all hope of being able to develop a proper relationship with their son again.

Owen's parents were able to communicate with their autistic son through Disney characters like Mowgli

But then he discovered animated films for himself and, in particular through the cartoon stories from Disney, found not only a way to understand the world around him, but also to express feelings himself. After his brother's birthday party, who was sad, the six and a half year old Owen said to his parents: "Walter doesn't want to grow up, like Mowgli or Peter Pan." In this first sentence he had spoken in years, Owen referred to characters the films The Jungle Book and Peter Pan . His father, Pulitzer Prize-winning Ron Suskind , discovered that he could contact him through the Disney films his son sees and use that as a common language to get through to his son. To express feelings such as love and sadness, Owen used the language of cartoon characters, which his father also trained in role-playing with a hand puppet from Iago, the mean sidekick of the villain in Aladdin . First and foremost, Owen identifies with the supporting characters, the helpers of the heroes from the Disney films, and as his father should have noticed, he was able to memorize many of them. So Ron Suskind found access to his son again.

As Owen got older, he had to learn that life is often more complex than Disney illustrated, but he is now finally facing the big step into a new, life of his own and is becoming a seemingly independent adult.

production

Literary template

The film is based on a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Suskind

The film is based on the book Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism , which Owen's father Ron Suskind published in 2014 as an autobiographical work about his own family. In it, the Pulitzer Prize winner describes how he and his family tried over two decades to establish a line of communication with Owen.

Staff and cast

Based on this book, director Roger Ross Williams created the documentary Life, Animated . Williams won an Oscar in 2010 for his short documentary Music by Prudence .

In the film, Williams shows Owen Suskind, 23 at the time of filming, who is about to leave his parents' house. Owen's parents and older brother Walter also have their say. Doctors and therapists try to explain to the viewer in the film what goes on in an autistic person like Owen and how his brain is flooded by sounds and visual impressions around him.

Film music and publication

The score was composed by Dylan Stark and Todd Griffin . The film premiered on January 23, 2016 as part of the Sundance Film Festival . The film was released in selected US cinemas on July 1, 2016 and also in selected German cinemas on June 22, 2017. In October 2017 the film was presented at the Hamburg Film Festival .

reception

Reviews

The film has so far won over 94 percent of Rotten Tomatoes ' critics .

Thomas Abeltshauser from epd Film says that Life, Animated tells one of the stories that Oscar voters love: “An autistic boy learns to speak with the help of Disney films and finds his place in life.” Abeltshauser, however, complains that Roger Ross Williams is a documentary as sticky and manipulative as the animation fairy tales that helped its protagonist.

Susanne Lenz from the Berliner Zeitung says that the film sometimes comes across as unbearably lively and exhilarated for Western European viewers. Her colleague Tilmann P. Gangloff writes in the Frankfurter Rundschau that Roger Ross Williams tells the story not devoid of pathos, but with a lot of empathy, and one of the most beautiful moments in the film is a session of the Disney club that Owen founded as a teenager. to talk to companions of fate about what the films can teach them for life: “The star guest at the last session is actor Jonathan Freeman , whom Owen met through his father's relationships in New York. Freeman spoke in Aladdin Jafar, and to everyone's surprise, his colleague Gilbert Gottfried , the spokesman for Iago , also turns up . "