Life, Animated director Roger Ross Williams finds true colors on the autism spectrum

For generations, Disney animated films have offered reliable escape from the real world. For Owen Suskind, these movies were the way into it.

Suskind demonstrated signs of autism when he was 3 years old and spent much of his youth in silent isolation, away from other children and even apart from his family. Then Owen’s father, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind (The One Percent Doctrine), noticed that his son was imitating the dialogue in Aladdin. Gradually, they began to communicate.

Ron Suskind’s book about his relationship with Owen, Life, Animated, is the springboard for a new documentary of the same title, by Oscar-winner Roger Ross Williams (Music by Prudence, the controversial and locally shot God Loves Uganda). Williams presented the film with Suskind at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia this past March. The Pitch spoke with Williams before another screening and learned the surprising benefits and perils of seeing the world through cartoons.  

The Pitch: How did you get the viewer inside Owen Suskind’s head?

Williams: First of all, I interviewed Owen on an Interrortron [the double-camera interviewing apparatus created by documentarian Errol Morris of The Thin Blue Line]. He’s the only one in the film who’s talking directly to the audience. Owen grew up watching images on a screen. He has trouble making eye-contact with people, but not to a screen. [Because the Interrotron shows the interviewer to his subject] he could look me right in the eye, and we could really connect.

I also put Disney clips on the screen, so Owen is mouthing the words and reacting, like in the scene in the beginning of the film with Peter Pan, and he’s doing the exact movements of the sword fight and reacting to the camera. It immediately takes you inside Owen’s head. Everyone else in the film is interviews sort of traditional style off-camera, so he’s the only one that’s connecting directly to the audience.

You give the audience a type of sonic overload, so that you could give viewers a sense of how Suskind goes through life.

We went to [George Lucas’] Skywalker Ranch with Pete Horner, who’s our mixer, and Al Nelson, who’s our sound designer. There’s no place better than Skywalker for sound. For me, the sound is a big part of telling the story. It was important to create the chaos that was inside of Owen’s head. He talks about how everything was fuzzy, and we really wanted to create that. The sound was also really important in the animated short because there’s no dialogue. It’s all about the sound and how the sidekicks and Owen interact with each other.

While I’m sure the folks at Disney are happy their movies helped Suskind emerge from his shell, Life, Animated is also blunt about the fact that, in real life, people break up with you, regardless of anything you’ve done.

[Autism expert and SocialThinking.com proprietor] Michelle Garcia-Winner says in the film, “Life is not a Disney movie.” Owen lives his life watching Disney films, and that was his language, but then he was faced with these challenges, challenges in a relationship. He has to deal with sex, which is not dealt with in Disney. As a young man, he has all these things that come up, and that was what was really interesting for me to sort of continue where the book left off and to follow Owen in his life now as he is becoming an independent young man and moving into the world. For me, it’s as much a coming-of-age story. Everyone has those things. Everyone moves into their own apartment and falls in love.

The movie does make you wonder how some people in the autism spectrum can get by without something like the Disney films to provide a link to the real world.

The thing about people with autism is that many of them have an affinity they connect to. Like at the end of the film where Owen goes to an autism conference in France, there was a man there whose affinity was carnivorous plants, and he did a whole talk on carnivorous plants. And that’s how he relates to the world, through carnivorous plants. Their minds are as sharp as, or even sharper than, ours.

We went to the Human Brain Project in Switzerland, where they’re mapping the human brain. There are 500 neuroscientists, and they took us to a room with Ron and Cornelia [Suskind, Owen’s mother]. We sort of literally went inside the brain of an autistic person. It’s actually firing at higher level. It’s just that the world is so intense that they block out everything, so they focus on it. And they focus on it with such laser precision. That’s probably why a lot of Silicon Valley has such a higher level of autism, because they can really focus.

What Ron and Cornelia realized was they could use that affinity to get to Owen, to connect with him. Because of the noise in his head, he focuses like a laser on this one thing, he can get so much deeper because he’s just focused on this one thing. We’re focused on a million things. We’re distracted by a million things. With people with autism, they can focus on one thing and get to such a deeper level. 


This must have been a huge change from God Loves Uganda.

God Loves Uganda was so emotionally draining and controversial and I really wanted to something that was uplifting and life affirming. I always say that after God Loves Uganda that people asked me, “What are you going to do next?” I answered, “I’m going to go to Disney World.” I think that what we need as a society is to realize that it’s not about fixing or curing people with autism. It’s about accepting people with autism and realizing the gifts they have to give us.

Because you’ve been primarily a journalist, is this the first time you’ve worked on something creative like the animation?

Absolutely. This was a creative dream, this project, because I got to work with amazing animators in Paris, a company called Mac Guff, the library of Disney people, and I got to bring all of these mediums together as tools for telling the story. It was a dream. I don’t know if I’ll ever have an experience this amazing in filmmaking.