Life, Animated (33 page)

Then we hear what the film’s title means. The father hated Nixon, among his many wrenching animosities. “He’s in heaven with Nixon,” Chris says, near the film’s end. “They’re hanging out. Playing poker and eating up meals and watching TV.” Improbable wisdom—or maybe not so improbable—so much like Owen and his sidekicks.

Cornelia and I don’t sleep much that night—we just talk. At a very late hour, we’ve worked our way across the many characters, to the filmmaker’s final insight about how, in terms of happiness, his autistic brother “has much of that stuff all figured out;” and “is guiding me,” Tom Murray concludes, “by just being who he is and living his life the way he does.”

Bleary-eyed, we slip into a conversation about how all the studies show that happiness is a comparative issue, at least once the basics of food, shelter, and clothing are handled; a calculus of identifying one’s peer group, and one’s rank within it (often an equation of more negatives than positives), or finding a place within a community, people you connect with. We agree that Owen has done that for us. Or we’ve done it for ourselves. And then agree it doesn’t matter, even if we could draw that line—a welcomed respite of the incalculable that ushers in sleep.

A week later, Walt trundles up to our bedroom for a forced viewing of the movie.

Cornelia’s extended family has crowded into our house for Thanksgiving and she’s decided they should see it. Her two sisters and their spouses settle in, along with Walt and a few cousins. They’re all attentive, though Walt is the only one who, like us, can step into the shoes of the characters; in his case, the main character, Tom, the filmmaker. What’s on-screen is an unfolding nightmare. He looks over at us, trying to gauge our reaction.

He’s a college senior, just turned twenty-two, home for turkey during a tough semester. He worries plenty that, someday, it’ll be him taking care of Owen and a pair of aging parents. He doesn’t need this movie to paint a picture for him. After twenty minutes, he looks for an opening to slip out.

The one person who’s not been asked to attend the bedroom screening is Owen, who’s in the basement. He’s watching
Pocahontas
—part of his annual Thanksgiving viewing. He has a lineup of movies for each holiday: Halloween (
The Nightmare Before Christmas
, Tim Burton’s
Sleepy Hollow
), Christmas (“Charlie Brown’s Christmas,” “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,”
It’s a Wonderful Life
,
Home
Alone
). Wouldn’t be a holiday without them. It’s not just the themes. He once explained to Walt that it connects him to each holiday across the years—all their Thanksgivings, since he was little—where he was, what he felt.

“Hey, Ow.”

“Hi Walter. Want to watch
Pocahontas
with me?”

“Sure, but pause it for a minute.” Owen sometimes likes to talk when one of his movies is running, but only about the movie.

Walt came home from Penn State for the weekend a month ago, and picked Owen up from Sunday art class. Something dawned on him on the drive back to State College, Penn State’s home.

“So, Owen—you know those girls from art, that pretty blond one that’s always talking to you.”

Owen nods.

“She’s at Sidwell. I know who she is. And here’s the thing—
she drives.
”

Owen looks at him. Nothing registers.

“So here’s what you do. Once you get to art next Sunday, tell her you may need a ride home. And ask her if she’d give you a lift. And if she says yes, slip outside for a minute, call Dad, and tell him one of the girls is driving you home. Dad’ll get it immediately—he’ll love that.”

Owen’s excited to see Walt excited, but he’s not sure why.

He’s running through the arithmetic—ask the girl for something he doesn’t need, and Dad will be happy?

“Does Dad not want to pick me up?”

“No, no—Dad’s happy to drive. This is about getting what you want.”

Owen looks at him quizzically. “What?”

Walt pauses, regroups.

“Wouldn’t it be fun if that really pretty girl, who seems to like you, drove you home. Just the two of you in her car. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Now, he sees. “Yes, it would be!”

Walt feels a surge of victory. Owen is not going to be that lonely fifty-year-old man in the movie, hanging out with his mother.

“And, listen. You and her in the car. Who knows where it’ll lead?”

Owen smiles—he knows this answer.

“Home!”

Owen told us long ago, that the sidekicks’ role is to “help the hero fulfill his destiny.” As he works at defining destiny, we settle ever more into the role of sidekicks.

Cornelia takes easily to it, still holding onto a bit of the shy kid she once was, never comfortable being the center of attention. I was raised thinking the role of hero was the only role you’d ever want; spoon fed it from the start, with mother as coach: hero isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.

But I’ve been taught otherwise, by parenthood and our special circumstances, with the lessons ramping up when Owen was three. But that period—nearly two decades, stretching back to our days as young marrieds, raising two small boys—is coming to an end.

It’s early April 2011, and Owen has been accepted into Riverview School, an innovative secondary school/college program on Cape Cod with two hundred kids, a campus near the beach, a full run of facilities and activities. He’ll be in a program called G.R.O.W. (Getting Ready for the Outside World), which goes all the way up to age twenty-two. The usual college calendar of holidays and breaks will apply. Roommates. Dining hall. Requirements and electives. A real college experience.

In just four months, we’ll be packing him off and having that moment at the dorm, where we make up his bed, give him the teary hug, and get in the car.

But every day now feels like drop-off day, carrying that immersive sensation of a big river, cool and strong, rushing around you.

Which is why we’re in California.

Owen wanted to come on one last trip to the dreamscape of Los Angeles. He now says, like a chant, that someday he’ll move here to be a Disney animator. We told him that what he’ll learn in college over the coming years will—if he works hard—make the possibility of a Hollywood ending that much more real. He asked if we could go one last time for “inspiration”—that’s the word he used.

Cornelia wanted to visit her best friend from childhood, who’s living out there, and who she so rarely saw. So it was set. We still controlled his schedule, without worrying about when he’d be off for Christmas vacations or spring breaks. It was a matter of volition.

Sidekicks, after all, have choices, in carrying forward their purpose.

Where Owen’s self-definition currently rests, within this construct of his own making, remains unclear. It’s something he’s been working through for years, in the deepest of the deep wells. He was clearly settled into the role of sidekick at eleven, drawing furiously in his pad and—and, as “the protekter of sidekicks”—ensuring that “no sidekick gets left behind.” At fourteen, he cleanly stated the starting point of his movie, wherein twelve sidekicks, he among them, would face obstacles that would force them to find the heroes within themselves.

I think it’s fair to say that he could have scarcely imagined the challenges that awaited him in the coming years, or how he would come to rely on certain sidekicks to advise him—to guide him, a fel-low sidekick, just as they tend to direct the hero—to get him this far.

In some ways, further than even he could have imaged. As of the morning of April 7, that distance traveled is about to include a second trip to Disney’s animation headquarters, and an office one step above where he ventured the previous year.

The “Sidekicks” write-up—basically, Owen’s life story along with a few finishing paragraphs suggesting it be made into some sort of a movie using animation mixed with live action—had made its way to the office of Don Hahn. He’s one of the most successful producers on the Disney lot—the producer of both
Beauty and the Beast
and
The Lion King
, two of the biggest movies in the company’s history. He also produced
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, in 1996; was associate producer on
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
, in 1988; and, most recently, produced a series of award-winning feature films under the banner Disneynature.

We’re here for a few days and spent yesterday at Disneyland. Tomorrow, Owen will go to Universal Studios. We’ll do a few other things he prizes in the gritty mecca, like go to the Hollywood Wax Museum on Hollywood Boulevard and drive up the twisting roads to get as close as is allowable to the famous
HOLLYWOOD
sign in Griffith Park.

Today we meet Don Hahn, though it’s not clear what kind of meeting it is. After our visit last summer with the animators, Don Hahn read a copy of the sidekicks write-up. He agreed to meet with Owen and me on our family trip west. But is this a social call or a pitch meeting? Owen has become a curio around Disney. But since Owen told us of the “four castles”—revealing how central the first encounter with Jonathan and last summer’s lovefest with the animators was to his budding identity, his
personhood
—our view is that any encounter with a Disney honcho, for any reason, is a golden moment. He’ll live off of it for years. Maybe forever.

In the rental car, driving onto the Disney lot on Alameda Avenue, I’m thinking of the conversation we had after that session with Dan Griffin, the one where Owen told me how his sidekicks were doing in the dark forest, and how—in that secret story, as well as the parallel story of his life—the inner hero emerges. He said it clearly that day: the making of “a movie that saves the world.”

But describing the concept of a pitch—of selling oneself and one’s idea—is like chatting with him about quantum physics; grasped or not, it’s a transactional engagement that affronts every chromosome in his being.

I fall back on Owen’s lexicon: “You know, he makes the movies—he helps decide which ones. Maybe you could tell him more about which sidekicks are in the forest, and what they’re up to. He might be interested.”

“I’m working on that,” he says.

“But I’m really excited to meet him!”

And he certainly is.

Owen shouts out his name and hugs him as Hahn, a big, bearded guy, with large, soft eyes, enters his outer office. He tells his assistant it’ll just be a few minutes—indicating it’ll probably be a short meeting—and leads us inside.

He first looks at Owen’s sketchbook and seems genuinely impressed. “You’ve got a little bit of everything in here; wow, good for you, these are really good,” he says with a sincere tone. Every time he looks at a sketch, he adds, “That’s a very good Rafiki,” or “This is a strong Sebastian”—that character’s voice, care of Owen, comes from the couch.

And soon, they’re doing voices. Or, mostly, it’s Owen’s doing them while Don laughs. Soon, both Don and I are egging Owen on.

My anxiety fades; my pushiness, perhaps?
Pitch?
Who cares! Owen’s telling his story in voices. I tap a reference, or Don does, and out one comes, sidekick after sidekick, from Iago to Rafiki to Merlin. Owen does voices from all of Don’s movies and at one point sings, “Witchcraft, nothing but witchcraft” in Frank Sinatra’s voice—a scene from Roger Rabbit that Owen loves. By the time he gets to “although, I know, it’s strictly
tabooooo
,” Don is singing with him.

At my prompt, Owen talks about his first call with Jonathan, how he told him
Aladdin
was about “accepting who you really are, and begin okay with that,” and Don tells him that for each movie, they post the main idea above the drafting rooms to inspire the animators: “Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” for
Beauty and the Beast
; “Remember Who You Are” for
The Lion King.
All I can think of after this exchange is how Owen’s interpretation, what he sees, goes so much deeper.

“You’ve figured us out—it’s not fair,” Don laughs. But, in a moment, he sees it, too: “You see so much more in these stories than most people.”

Which bumps things right along to the deeper meaning of Owen’s idea—that one line, about a band of sidekicks searching for a hero and, not being able to find one, they have no choice but to summon heroism from within themselves.

“I love that idea,” Don exults. “It’s an everyman idea. You can actually walk in the shoes of the sidekicks,” as they search. “It’s just so cool.”

I’m feeling a little light-headed. We’re actually talking about the concept and its possibilities. Don’s working it—“it’s so much the way life really is—we might be a hero for one day; then it’s back to being a sidekick. Or not even a day.”

Alright
, I think,
now we’re getting somewhere.

“Can I ask you a question?” Owen interjects. It’s about Mary Wickes, who voices one of Quasimodo’s three gargoyle sidekicks, and died during the final days of production for
Hunchback
. “She was replaced by Jane Withers, wasn’t she?”

Owen knows this answer, knows everything there is to know about these two old ladies. Wickes, who he bonded with when he embraced this character as a young child, died right as the movie was being finished in 1996. She was replaced by Withers, who was mentioned in a mysterious nonspecific credit. Once he discovered what happened, he fixated for years on which lines were done by Wickes, and which were handled by Withers. And he thinks he knows based on the slightest vocal variations. But he wants confirmation from Don, who marvels at Owen’s factual knowledge—“almost no one knows that Owen”—not realizing it’s the edge of a cliff.

What I realize, sitting next to Owen, is that there is a God and he’s having some fun on his lunch-break: let’s put the salesman-father in a pitch meeting with his autistic son, and—what the hell—throw a thousand pounds of pressure on the nape of his neck.
Oh, what fun!

I tamp down panic. If we go down the Wickes/Withers rabbit hole, they’ll call Disney security in a half hour and drag us out. I’ve been down there—Uranus Trench. There’s no bottom. Owen will run through the movie, line by line—which line he thinks is Wickes’s, which ones were done by Withers, and opine whether Mary Wickes should have gotten mostly full credit for doing the voice. There are deeper issues driving it: how this unanswered question, of who did what and who deserves credit, undermines his confidence in the veracity of a few thousand credits he’s cataloged in his head and weighted with emotions. If this one is imprecise, which others are as well? It’s like Ben Bernanke buying groceries and realizing the bills in his hand are counterfeit. Should he keep spending or call in federal marshals?