Life Animated
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Do You Need to Premiere at a Major Festival to Qualify your Doc for an Oscar? Roger Ross Williams on the Shortlist Process
One of the most intriguing aspects of this year’s Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable, which I wrote about a couple months back, was the lively back-and-forth that occurred when the subject of the Oscar shortlist came up. From all appearances it seems that a documentarian’s chances of making that Holy Grail cut are “predetermined” — i.e., if your film didn’t debut at one of a narrow number of A-list fests, well, forget about it. However, Roger Ross Williams, a member of the Documentary Branch of the AMPAS board of governors, took vigorous issue with that assessment. Which intrigued […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 2, 2017 -
New Documentaries Use Animation to Bring Nonfiction Stories to Life
In recent decades, some of the best documentary films — including Oscar-winners such as Bowling for Columbine and Searching for Sugar Man, and, more recently, festival favorites Point and Shoot and Meet the Patels — have have relied on animation to tell compelling nonfiction stories in nontraditional ways. It’s a technique audiences have grown accustomed to and nonfiction filmmakers have learned to adopt with varying degrees of success. While in the past, documentary purists might have posited that animation had no place in non-fiction storytelling, it’s now largely accepted that even observational documentaries involve some degree of manipulation. If anything, by using animation in a documentary, the manipulation is more […]
by Paula Bernstein on Jun 23, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Award-Winning Life, Animated, More Than a “Film About Autism”
Directed by Academy Award-winner Roger Ross Williams, Life, Animated, won the directing award in the U.S. documentary competition at Sundance earlier this year before making the festival circuit. Based on the bestselling book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, the documentary tells the inspirational story of Owen Suskind, a young man with autism who connects to the world through animated Disney films. The film, which just got its first trailer (above), follows Owen as he takes his first steps towards independence. Interweaving classic Disney sequences with scenes from Owen’s life, the film’s original animation provides access to Owen’s amazing imagination. “Owen’s world and […]
by Paula Bernstein on Jun 14, 2016 -
An Innocent Children’s Holiday? Roger Ross Williams on “Black Pete” and his Short Film, Blackface
Admittedly, it was with a feeling of vindication and satisfaction that I stumbled upon Roger Ross Williams’ most recent short Blackface, now streaming on CNN. The Academy Award-winning director — whose feature Life, Animated premiered this week in the US Documentary Competition at Sundance — is a recent transplant to the Netherlands, and his thoughts upon first encountering Zwarte Piet (“My heart sank and I felt a little nauseated”) were a bit different from my own. As a white American, my initial reaction years ago to seeing both kids and adults in blackface and Afro wigs celebrating in the streets […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 1, 2016 -
Five Questions for Life, Animated Director Roger Ross Williams
Chances are you’ve experienced one or two-dozen animated films from Walt Disney Studios. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King: the studio famous for introducing the world to Mickey Mouse has produced some of the most identifiable films (and, subsequently, images) of the twentieth century. One of the studio’s most ardent fans is Owen Suskind, a young man diagnosed as autistic at the age of three and the subject of a memoir, Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, written by his father Ron Suskind. Using Disney films as a guide to communicate and express himself to […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 29, 2016 -
DP Tom Bergmann on Filming Autism Up Close in Sundance Doc Life, Animated
An autistic young man finds speech with the help of Disney animated movies in Life, Animated, a documentary based on the best-selling book by Ron Suskind about his son Will. The film was shot by Tom Bergmann, a cinematographer with more than 20 documentary shorts and features to his credit. Below, Bergmann discusses how he and the filmmakers worked to become “like a silent extended family” to Will and his family. Life, Animated premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 28, 2016
