Life, Animated review: The power of love, and Disney cartoons

If you're lucky enough to have a verbal chum on the autistic spectrum, then odds are you'll be aware of the importance of echolalia. When Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, and his wife Cornelia noticed that their son Owen was repeating a phrase from a Disney's The Little Mermaid, they were astonished.

At the age of three, the same little boy had seemed to disappear into pre-verbal babbling – “As if he had been kidnapped,” notes dad.

The consultant told them the phrase was most likely meaningless repetition, like a parrot might produce. But then, after his older brother’s birthday party, Owen drew an extraordinarily astute and complex parallel between his sibling and the Disney characters Mowgli and Peter Pan.

As this unbearably moving documentary opens, Owen is a high-functioning young adult who is preparing to move into his own apartment. Smart and articulate, he is not the product of some phoney-baloney cure for autism, nor is he some kind of freakish savant.

He is, rather, a much-loved son and brother, who found, in his passion for Disney characters, a roundabout route into speech, writing and communication.

Tellingly, the characters Owen loves most are not the heroes but the comic relief: Iago, Timon, Pumbaa, Jiminy Cricket. When he is bullied at school, he responds with his own story, called The Land of the Lost Sidekicks.

Taking cues from Ron Suskind's memoir, Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, director Roger Ross Williams and DOP Tom Bergmann take an incremental approach, patiently following Owen and his family as they talk through the past two decades. The camera hovers as a concerned friend might, as Owen bumps into his former girlfriend for the first time after they break up.

The camera very nearly leaps for joy – as will the viewer – when Gilbert Gottfried, the voice of Iago, twisted parrot adviser to Aladdin’s nemesis Jafar, pays a surprise visit to the Disney fan club that Owen founded.

Editor David Teague skilfully places original animated inserts and favourite movie scenes to allow us a brief glimpse into Owen’s wonderful Disneyfied psyche. Bravo, House of Mouse, for clearing use of the clips for this vital, marvellous film.