Life, Animated

Director Roger Ross Williams's immensely rewarding documentary tells the story of the Suskind family and shows how love, sensitive parenting and watching tons of kids' movies can save a life. In the early 1990s, Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (who also wrote a book on his family's experience), and his wife Cornelia were devastated when their son Owen started to regress developmentally around the age of three and was eventually diagnosed with autism. However, Owen later regained the ability to speak and communicate with others, first by echoing lines of dialogue from the Disney films he loved. In his 20s here, living semi-independently and gainfully employed, Owen is a walking success story even if there remain gaps in his understanding that films can't fill. (His brother Walt laments there are no Disney films about sex, for example.) Life, Animated benefits enormously from the Walt Disney Company's willingness to let the film-makers use abundant clips from their films for illustrative purposes, an unexpected act of generosity for an institution that has always zealously protected its intellectual property.