The Four Hundred: Combating Stigmas Through Cinema

Loop - Pixar

For decades, short films have been recognized for their ability to construe complex ideas and tell a moving tale beautifully through the art of motion pictures.

Major animation studios such as Pixar and Dreamworks and other independent filmmakers have shown a rising comfortability in construing sensitive topics through relatable, animated shorts. 

The 2020 Pixar-animated short film Loop portrays two summer camp kids as they embark on a canoeing trip. Though not explicitly said, Renee is nonverbal and shows signs that place her on the autism spectrum. 

Throughout the trip, the boy Marcus notices certain motions and sounds Renee makes, along with other triggers that cause her to be emotional and gets frustrated with his bewilderment. But he soon realizes how to be patient and understanding of her way of thinking and communicating.

“When you’re talking about something like people who have big differences, people who have disabilities,” Loop writer and director Erica Milsom said, “that can be seen as uncomfortable or awkward. Doing that in animated format has a really great power of disarming the viewer.” 

Float, a 2019 Pixar-animated short, gained attention for its diversity in portraying a Filipino father and son and for non-explicitly acknowledging the stigma of autism and how people, and especially parents, can come to accept their child who falls on the spectrum. 

The child has the power to float, and whenever he is excited or happy, he drifts towards the sky. His father enjoys his antics for a moment but quickly becomes embarrassed of his son when he gets side-eyed by neighbors. 

In a tear-jerking climax with the only spoken words in the short, the father exclaims, “Why can’t you be normal?!” The little boy returns to the ground, head bowed to the ground, visibly saddened. 

At that moment, the father realizes that rather than hiding his son from the world, he should be proud to be his father and make his son’s happiness his priority.  

The short delivers a tear-jerking message about accepting people who have been stigmatized, outcasted, and often very misunderstood. 

According to a study done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2009-2017, the percentage of children they studied aged 3-17 years that had been diagnosed with a developmental disability was 17% or 1 in 6 children. 

These included: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, Tourette syndrome, and autism spectrum disorder. 

The 2018 award-winning animated short film Ian, written by Gastón Gorali, portrays a boy with cerebral palsy who feels confined to his wheelchair and outcasted by the other children who pray freely on the playground.

This short is entirely free of a script, allowing the art to guide the narrative. 

The audience gets a visual of Ian, who struggles to bring his cup to his mouth or run with the other kids. Whenever he feels incapable, he dissipates into a hundred tiny pieces floating through a wire fence surrounding the playground and returning to his wheelchair. 

It is not until one girl grasps his hand to keep him from flying away when all the kids join her effort to pull him back into the playground. The pull outside is so strong; it whisks away all the children outside of the fence. 

Once outside, the children see how he is outside of the fence and in his wheelchair and show him compassion as they walk back to the playground hand-in-hand, the fence that was once between them now dissipated. 

And the short is based on the real-life Ian, who has cerebral palsy, and his mother, Sheila Graschinsky, who saw how her son was treated and wanted to spread awareness and change perceptions about kids with disabilities. 

“The film is an opportunity for all society…to break down barriers, walls, and free us from prejudices,” Graschinsky said. In addition, the film was crafted to “guide [all children] to acquire concrete tools to be people of solidarity.”

Ian won international awards, including ‘Best in Show’ from the Accolade Global Film Competition, ‘Best Animation’ at the L.A. Shorts Festival, and ‘Best Animation’ at the Delhi Shorts International Film Festival. 

For many of the directors of these short films, the lack of knowledge and resistance to understanding developmental disabilities is a driving force in spreading messages through a comfortable medium like animation.

Even as dark and brooding as it may be, like in the stop-motion Mary and Max (2009) that told a story that focused on two very different individuals both struggling with their issues and disabilities, but growing together and gaining perspective through each trial and tribulation they face from across the world. 

Mary Dinkle is an eight-year-old daughter of two distracted parents, and Max is a 44-year-old overweight Jewish man with Aspergers. The duo is an unlikely pair of friends that becomes the best of friends after a turbulent journey of being pen pals. 

The film aims to achieve worldly appraise in its ability to tell a story about an individual with a condition like Aspergers without making it solely about the disability. 

It showed how both individuals were able to teach each other lessons that allowed them to look within themselves and learn something new about the way they live their lives.

Refreshing an interest and awareness toward developmental disabilities through stop motion or animation has been a step towards further awareness. It continues to win significant accolades and combat stigmas in a small yet powerful way. 

Creating more inclusive, authentic films that reflect individuals rarely represented in mass media allows the public to become more knowledgeable about a community that takes up a large part of this world, about 1% of it, to be exact.