Diagnosed with autism as a toddler, Owen Suskind had his first conversation with his father when he was six years old—only he wasn’t speaking with his father directly, but with a puppet from Aladdin. In this heartwarming Oscar-nominated doc, Roger Ross Williams shows how Owen and his devoted parents used his obsession with Disney animations as a pathway to language and a framework for making sense of the world. A hit at this year’s Hot Docs and Best Director award winner at Sundance, Life, Animated follows Owen’s journey from being unable to speak—seeming to vanish emotionally and cognitively when he was three years old—to graduating from college and moving out of his parents’ place at age 23. Perhaps it’s like the Emperor in Mulan says: “The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of them all.”
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