Life, Animated

by Ron Suskind

  I think to egg him on, to impel gratitude, Howard is making this all happen—but I bite my tongue as I turn toward Owen. Immaculately dressed in khakis, a striped polo shirt, and stylish brown shoes, he’s intent and businesslike, his sketchbook under his arm. He’s context-deep on visits to Walt Disney World. Here, it goes even deeper; he feels this is the place for him.

  A minute later, up a flight of stairs, our delegation knocks on the open door. A dark-haired man at a drafting easel swivels around.

  “You’re Andreas Deja,” Owen says, in a tone of disbelief. Smallish and youthful in middle age, with a wide, quick smile framed by a Vandyke, Deja crosses the room, right hand outstretched.

  “You must be Owen.”

  “I’m so happy. I love what you do,” Owen says.

  Deja is gently taken aback, almost bashful. He and a handful of other senior animators, middle-aged or better, are considered the heirs to the so-called “Nine Old Men,” a storied group of artists—Les Clark, Marc Davis, Frank Thomas, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Wolfgang Reitherman, Milt Kahl, and Ollie Johnston—who started with Walt Disney, creating the first signature hits beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and shaping the company’s animated movies across five decades. Eric Larson, running the studio’s training division in 1980, guided the young Deja and other animators, who then created what was soon called the “new golden age”: the big four starting with The Little Mermaid in 1989.

  “So which are your favorite characters,” Deja says, warmly.

  “All of them!” Owen cries, and reels off ten of Andreas’s animation credits, including King Triton, the father from The Little Mermaid, Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, Scar from The Lion King, and, of course, Jafar.

  “I met Jonathan Freeman, he’s my friend!” Owen can barely contain himself. He’s become an exclamation point.

  Andreas nods—“Yes, Jonathan, a wonderful guy”—and then he slows things down a bit, puts his arm around Owen, and then they just talk.

  Owen shows him the sketchbook. Andreas is impressed—“these are really great”—and Owen does this little shoulder swivel, an autistic tic, that he does when a heavy jolt of joy overloads his special neurology.

  We all listen, intently, crowded in the doorway. “Owen,” Cornelia says, “would you like to give Andreas a picture?” He nods and carefully tears out one of Rafiki.

  At which point, Andreas, enlivened, skips over to the drafting table and, after three minutes, turns to hand Owen a rendering of King Triton. “Now, we’re even.”

  Owen seems suddenly overwhelmed. He’s up on his toes, like he’s going to start jumping. But Andreas seems to feel it, too—the crazy vertigo of his greatest fan turning out to be an autistic kid, whose greatest joy, and talent, is relentlessly drawing characters Andreas and his gang invented. Those characters live inside the boy. Will forever.

  “I really want to thank you, Owen, for coming.” And they hug.

  This happens several more times, as Owen visits two other senior animators in the hall—Dale Baer and Eric Goldberg. The crazy rhythm of the meetings is similar to the Deja meeting, where Owen reels off all their credits, dating back to the 1970s. They show Owen drawings, old and new, and he shows them renderings of their characters in his sketchbook. It has the feel of a reunion.

  With Goldberg there’s an added dimension—he’s a specialist in sidekicks. He created Robin Williams’s Genie, Danny DeVito’s Phil, and Louis the Alligator, the signature sidekick in Disney’s latest feature, The Princess and the Frog, which came out in 2009 to good reviews and a respectable box office. There’s much talk of sidekicks with Eric, with Owen doing Phil’s voice and then calling the Genie “the most powerful of the sidekicks.” Howard, clustered in the doorway with the rest of us, interjects—“wait the Genie’s not a sidekick”—only to have Owen correct him, with Eric’s agreement: “Of course he is, Howard—stick with Owen on this.” Owen does another shoulder swivel, a current of affirmation racing though his ganglia.

  Finally, the delegation races toward the office of Glen Keane, who’s kind of the boss of the group. It’s fair to say the other animators have a childlike quality; they draw pictures, do voices, and try to make each other laugh. Keane, the son of Bil Keane, the cartoonist/creator of The Family Circus comic strip, is the father of two adult animators and has been at this his whole life, managing change, and surviving it. He’s Deja’s artistic peer—having created Ariel, the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, and Tarzan—but with the demeanor and cadence of a teacher or a pastor.

  He looks at Owen’s sketchbook. Like the others, he praises the drafting and precision, and asks Owen how it feels to draw.

  “I can see and feel with my fingers,” he says. “I feel what the characters do, if they’re happy or sad or scared or lighthearted. When I draw it, I can feel it.”

  This is something Owen has never said, even to us.

  Keane smiles and digs in. He’s the only one, it seems, who has read what we sent to Howard—the write-up of Owen’s story—and he’s purposeful, wanting to get a sense of who’s in front of him.

  He takes Owen on a tour of his large office, drawings rising on the ten-foot-high walls, as we all watch, wanting Owen to have an unmanaged encounter with one of his heroes—maybe a once-in-a-lifetime moment. But overhearing a question about how long it takes Owen to draw one of his pictures, I detect the deft, probing tone of a job interviewer.

  My eyes refocus and pulse quickens. Of course on the first night when we saw the first pad of sidekick drawings we dreamed of him maybe becoming an animator at Disney—the kind of dream/fantasy that we once embraced for both boys, as they ran around the yard in Dedham.

  That was eight years ago—eight years in which we saw the episodic nature of his path; one step forward, two back; though, of course, all of it is progress. But not enough, not nearly enough, to imagine such a thing and again begin harboring dreams for him. We’d given that up. It was about living day to day, and making the most of these moments.

  But in this moment, those embers started to glow. What if? Who can say? Miracles occur. A few feet away Owen is kicking into one of his standard lines—“I want the return of traditional, hand-drawn animation, especially by Disney, to start a new golden age.” When he said this an hour before, Andreas—a fellow hand-drawn purist—cheered.

  Glen, though, steers Owen over to a large computer in the far corner. He beckons us all to come over. There’s an animated figure on the screen, mostly in outline. He hands Owen a thick stylus and asks him to change the shape or draw in features, right on the screen, telling him that a computer, inside the screen, will reshape the figure to meet his drawn line. It’s a hybrid, where the computer is guided by the artist’s pencil. Owen bears down, but everything’s wrong. He needs to be looking at a picture from a Disney book to draw his version; he needs the tactile feel of a pencil in his fingers, the bond paper sliding across the pad of his hand. Beyond the technical issues, he’s deeply unsettled by computer animation.

  He can’t draw anything of quality—a mess of lines—and puts down the mechanical pencil. My heart sinks.

  Cornelia turns away—she can’t watch.

  But then Keane grabs the mouse and clicks. The screen fills with an unfolding scene, of Rapunzel spinning, as her famous hair—blond in Disney’s version—flows in a swirling cascade. It’s a snatch from the movie Tangled, the Rapunzel story, four years in the making, that’s due out in November.

  It’s Keane’s baby. He’s executive producing it along with three others including John Lasseter, who left in the early 1990s to launch Pixar, which Disney ended up buying in 2006. They are working on a project to merge hand-drawn’s artistry with the ease and flexibility of CGI (computer generated imagery). This software, produced by Disney at a cost of nearly $20 million to bridge these warring camps, will be on display in Tangled.

  As he reduces the screen, Keane tells of showing those few seconds of Rapunzel’s hair to his mentor, Ollie Johnsto
n, the last surviving member of the Nine Old Men, just before he died in 2008. “I told him to look at the hair, the way it flows like a moving painting, the best of both hand-drawn and computer,” Keane recounts. “Ollie looked at it. And said, that’s very nice, ‘but what I’m interested in is what’s she feeling.’”

  The mention of Ollie Johnston activates Owen’s hyper-focus.

  “It’s not about the animation,” Glen says intently. “In terms of the animation, we can do anything now on the screen. It’s about the story.”

  He looks intently at Owen.

  “Remember, all the great movies all begin with a story. It’s the stories that we need. “

  Owen drinks it in, nodding vigorously. “I understand.”

  Glen swiftly draws a picture of Ariel, signs it, gives it to Owen, and they hug. We profusely thank him, and we’re off, as Owen begins to vigorously pace and gesticulate in the hall. Cornelia can see he’s flagging. An hour of interactions, especially of this intensity, is like ten hours for a typical person. This is another little recognized feature of autism—how much energy it takes to engage with another human being.

  But there’s one more stop in the building. After a few turns, Howard ushers us into a round striped room with a high-domed ceiling: Walt Disney's office. The room is cool and pristine like a shrine. Owen drifts in and turns, arms out, eyes carried upward on the stripes.

  Cornelia and I watch the slow spin, palms up, like a pilgrim in ecstasy.

  Disney was a driven man. His first cartoon studio failed after just one month while he was still a teenager, and he later had a difficult time with two distributors who tried to steal his characters away. The vast majority of cartoons released in the nascent days of the animation industry, were like moving comic strips: goofy, exaggerated, played for gags. With Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—called “Disney’s folly” and almost bankrupting his still modest-sized studio—he experimented with the presentation of complex human feelings. To help the animators understand what he was envisioning, he would tell them the stories, sometimes acting out the parts. Their job was to draw it so people could feel it. Audiences, startled to experience joy and sadness while watching moving artwork, cheered. They literally stood and applauded in theaters.

  He’d taken a crafted image, hand-drawn in a way anyone could on a pad—albeit drafted by professional artists—and turned it into a verisimilitude of life that carried basic human emotions. That was his real innovation—presenting lifelike emotions on the screen to draw forth real emotions.

  And that’s really why Owen’s here—emotions. It’s unsettling to see him set reverently, blissfully, on the striped room’s lone couch, as though he’s sitting in the lap of God. The man started a company that makes movies, sells things, and runs theme parks.

  There are times when we felt like Walt Disney kidnapped him; that Owen lived in his world more than ours. Along with the joy of discovering that Disney products provided a way to meet him, to be with him, there were times when there was real resentment about the important role these characters had assumed in our lives. Some of that was eased today. Hearing Owen talk to the animators—and seeing them moved, and often surprised, by how he had to rely on their movies—reminded us that this was always a dialogue: Owen, since his earliest days, talking to the screen. What the lifelike emotions presented in these movies drew from him, and still do, are his emotions, his deepest feelings, from his life as our son. Not Walt Disney’s.

  Cornelia almost rear-ends the car in front of her.

  Hearing the screeching brakes, the driver—a woman stopped at a four-way intersection—turns in the driver’s seat to see what sort of idiot nearly hit her. Cornelia offers a “forgive me” shrug, swiftly parks, and leaps out of the car.

  She can’t believe there’s a FOR RENT sign on the lawn of a house just six blocks from where we live, what looks like the perfect house: one story, maybe three bedrooms, an enclosed backyard. She jots down the rental agent’s number on a grocery-store receipt and whispers to herself, “Please God, let this work.”

  She has just one item to complete her setup of the transition program—a place to house it. Everything else is set. A former Pasquaney camper with Walt, who worked with autistic young adults while getting his college degree in psychology, will be the program director. He’ll manage, teach, job coach, and guide Owen, Brian, and Ben through a year of independent living skills. She’s been working all summer on creating the curriculum and an array of activities. And she just bought a used van on eBay, for Tyler, the house manager, to drive the trio where they need to go. She’ll be in charge, supervising him, and all three families will share the cost.

  She told all of this to a realtor for the apartment she saw a month ago in late July in Bethesda. They had already agreed to the rental. They were talking logistics for the paperwork, when she said it would be three autistic young adults and a supervisor. Sorry, no. End of discussion. Cornelia explained they won’t even be sleeping there most nights. It’ll be a place they’ll be working on skills, like cooking and cleaning, traveling on buses and subways. Sorry, we can’t have “a group” here.

  She was beside herself. “But how is it functionally any different than three guys sharing an apartment?” She got no response. The matter was not negotiable.

  At the next apartment, when they said it was against policy, she demanded to see where this prohibition is found in the lease. We’ll get back to you, was the evasive response.

  The third apartment was less ideal. But it was mid-August, so she couldn’t be choosy. The landlord said he had nothing against autistic people, but he’d need to check with the owner. When that “no” came back, we did some online research and found that the building was owned by a rabbi. I spent half a day digging up Talmudic references in drafting an impassioned letter. He turned us down—the Talmud says nothing about rental properties in multiunit structures—prompting me to write a terse follow-up letter, beginning, “And you call yourself a Rabbi?”

  We’ve already begun paying Tyler. The kids are ready. I said I’ll give over my office/studio behind the house. It’s one big room—tight for four people—but it would suffice. I can see about renting an office elsewhere or working in the house.

  The morning after seeing the rental sign, Cornelia and I go out for breakfast, out of Owen’s earshot.

  “We can’t get turned down again,” she says after we order.

  I tell her I’m willing to offer my office. She swats that away. “That’s utterly ridiculous. You’re finishing a book. Where are you going to do it? On the front lawn.”

  “No…I’ll manage.”

  This is a typical exchange. Call it “The Sacrifice Games.” Who can sacrifice more. It’s difficult for both to sacrifice simultaneously—so there are strategic issues, of move and countermove. No prize money attached. But the deification points are redeemable for periodic gifts and regular trips to the moral high ground. Cornelia generally crushes me here, but I’m making a run with the office.

  She dismisses the whole subject—it’d be a disaster—and switches tact.

  “Today’s basic question,” she says, “is do I lie?” For her this is a massive moral sacrifice—nice move.

  Cornelia hates to lie and isn’t very good at it. But these are special circumstances. We begin to work through rationales. I spend a fair amount of my life trying to understand the “good enough reasons” for why sources or subjects do what they do. It helps me to better render them “in full context”—that’s what I tell them—in a way that undercuts judgment.

  Cornelia has firm codes of conduct. She wants me to try to help her get around them. So, the problem, I tell her, are the misimpressions people have of autism. The unknown scares them and, even if they know someone with autism, the spectrum is so wide they can’t be sure what they’re getting. At noon today, you just don’t tell them that these four young men—the three guys, plus Tyler—are any different from any other group. Tyler can speak for the quartet.
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br />   Eventually, when they meet the other three and recognize they’re mildly challenged, they’ll also see that they’re gentle, happy, and compulsive rule-followers. The owner will never have better tenants and she’ll have met her first autistic spectrum people. It’s ignorance that causes fear. That’s how it’ll be conquered.

  “Ends justifies the means,” Cornelia says, ruefully, as the omelets are served.

  “We could also do breaking eggs and omelets,” I say, drawing a small laugh, but enough to seal it.

  Three hours later, she’s completed the house tour. The owner, an African American woman in her fifties is beginning to ask if Cornelia has questions, including does the house fit her needs. It’s perfect. Three bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, backyard. Not cheap—$2,500—but manageable, split between the families. She then starts to ask a few questions about the guys. Cornelia’s ready. She’s rehearsed. Three college guys, one just out of college and…

  “Listen, I have to tell you, it’s three autistic guys and a supervisor.” She describes them, how they’re really no trouble, and that she’s been turned down at three different places.

  The owner pauses for a long minute. “Because you told me the truth, it’s yours.”

  Based on a series of bargaining agreements over the decades between Actors’ Equity and The Broadway League (producers), New York stage actors tend to be off from Sunday afternoon until the Tuesday evening performance.

  It also so happens that Halloween in 2010 falls on a Sunday.

  The combined result of this virtuous confluence means that Owen, sitting in his corner nook of Maureen’s artist’s den, drawing a picture of the Genie in a wild pastel montage, has the voices in his head replaced by something more real.

  “Owen, are you in here…?”

  “Oh my gosh, it’s Jonathan Freeman!”

  Owen leaps up, arms out and looks quickly at me, Freeman’s chauffer today—I nod a yes, hugging is fine—before he throws his arms around a smiling, well-coifed baritone, who took a personal day for his Sunday afternoon’s performance and caught an early-morning train.