Three years ago, Roger Ross Williams was looking around for the subject of his next documentary. He had become the first African American filmmaker to win a directing Oscar, awarded for his short film Music By Prudence, which was about a severely disabled Zimbabwean woman, Prudence Mabhena, who overcame prejudice to become a singer-songwriter. In the feature-length God Loves Uganda he charted the campaign in that country to make homosexuality punishable by death. Then an old friend, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, told him about the book he and his wife Cordelia were writing about their son, Owen, who developed autism at the age of two. Owen had only begun to make contact again through dialogue from his beloved Walt Disney films. “He’s using these movies to make sense of the world he’s living in,” explained Ron, whose first proper conversation with his son since the diagnosis was conducted using a toy of Iago, the parrot from Aladdin, and speaking to him in that character’s gravelly voice.
Owen was now in his early 20s. He had founded his school’s Disney club, where he encouraged other students with developmental difficulties to watch, analyse and discuss those animated movies. “When I heard about Disney club it clicked,” the 43-year-old director tells me over mint tea in a London hotel bar. “I was, like, ‘This is it. This is my next film.’ God Loves Uganda was such an emotionally draining experience, being embedded in a community which wanted me, as a gay man, to die. Now I was determined to do something upbeat.”
The result, Life, Animated, is unequivocally that. It follows a year in Owen’s life as he navigates his way through graduation, his relationship with his girlfriend, Emily, and the challenge of living on his own for the first time. Woven into that footage are interviews with his family, home movies that show him playing Peter Pan games before the autism struck and, most radically, animated scenes that bring to life the stories he has written and illustrated. As Owen grew up, he became a prolific drawer but his subjects were always the Disney sidekicks, never the heroes. In The Land of the Lost Sidekicks, he wrote about a young outcast and his fellow stooges who struggle to become heroes again.
Williams’s attempt to secure extracts from Disney films was a triumph over adversity in itself. “That took a year,” he says. The clincher was a presentation for the studio’s department heads at which he screened scenes alongside the Suskinds’ home movies. “When the lights came up there were sniffles. Ron refers to it as The Day I Made the Lawyers Cry.” He must have got used to the sound of sobbing in the 11 months since Life, Animated had its premiere at Sundance, where he won the directing award. “For hours after each screening, people would come up to me and be in tears and want to hug.” He grins. “I’m a hugger anyway, so it’s fine.”
What they are responding to is not only the compassionate filmmaking or the uplifting story, but the directness of Owen himself, who is a warmly magnetic screen presence. He paces around muttering in Disney dialogue and delivers grandiose statements in a matter-of-fact monotone. Describing the time he was bullied at school, he says he “fell into darkness and walked the halls of fear”; a domestic setback moves him to ask sullenly: “Why is life full of unfair pain and tragedy?” Though Disney films provide him with instruction and inspiration, he also has to negotiate the inevitable shortfall between movies and reality. Like any of us.
“I knew Owen was gold the first time I saw him slow-dancing with Emily at their Valentine’s Day ball,” recalls Williams. “He was everything you could ask for in a character – he’s adorable, he’s good-looking, he has personality. And he’s the perfect documentary subject because he never looks into the camera.” That brings its own problems. “He can’t tell a lie. I’d say, ‘Owen, we didn’t get that shot, can you walk through the door again?’ And he’d be, like, ‘I just walked through the door. Why would I do it again?’ He can’t fake it.” At least Williams knows that Owen’s enthusiasm for the movie is genuine. “He came running out afterwards and hugged me, which is very uncharacteristic of him, and he said: ‘I love it!’”
Like Williams’s previous work, Life, Animated is a kind of disguised autobiography. “I’m in every film, even though I’m not actually in them. And I’m always working something out.” In Music By Prudence, it was his feelings of alienation: Prudence was regarded as the product of witchcraft, while Williams was doubly spurned by the homophobic religious community in his hometown of Easton, Pennsylvania. Not only was he gay, he was also the result of an affair between his mother and the local deacon. (Everyone knew except Williams, who didn’t discover the truth until his teens.) God Loves Uganda saw him confronting the rejection he found at home by throwing himself into the jaws of his would-be oppressors. “It was a way for me to cleanse and deal with that hatred and pain and try to understand why people would feel that way about someone like me. The preachers who were fighting for the death penalty were telling me, ‘You can’t be gay because we really like you!’ And I was saying to them, ‘You can’t be this crazy murderer because you’re so nice!’”
Life, Animated is no less pertinent to Williams and not only because he belongs to two groups (gay and African American) who have commonly been seen as sidekicks or adjuncts. If, that is, they have been seen at all. “What I’m working out here is the classic theme of someone who was undervalued and overlooked. Like Owen, I was a loner who created a fantasy world. I had my own Land of Lost Sidekicks, where I pretended I lived in Paris with my best friend, a little cowboy based on a Marky Maypo doll. When I heard Owen’s story, it was a natural fit for me.”
Despite his success, Williams still has sidekick moments, days when he feels people look straight past him. Oscar winners are usually besieged by calls from agents and executives but Williams’s phone was silent in the weeks after he scooped his prize. “It was Oscars So White,” he says bluntly. “The establishment wants to connect with people who are like them and I wasn’t. I’m a black gay man from a poor working-class family. Most of the people who look like me are in prison.” In fact, that’s the subject of his next film, in which he returns to Easton to find out why most of his peers have ended up behind bars – a kind of Life, Incarcerated. “I escaped my destiny. The odds were that I would end up in prison but I didn’t.”
Life, Animated has helped Owen to escape his destiny too. In the hotel lobby, I run into Ron, who tells me his son is having the time of his life. He is more confident these days and he’s in his element conducting the Q&A sessions after screenings of the film, where audiences have been going wild for him. “Roger calls it ‘the Owen effect,’” Ron laughs. “Turns out that having thousands of people cheering your name can do wonders for your self-esteem.”
• Life, Animated is released in the UK on 9 December
