Master Oogway Ascends and Other Perfect Things
Autism, animation and the human bridge of art
I’ve watched Kung Fu Panda at least 100 times; maybe more. I’m not exaggerating. My 14 year old autistic son watches movies on loop and that’s one that’s in the rotation. He’s done it for as long as he’s been able to figure out how to use a remote control. So for the last twelve years I’ve had some time to evaluate, probably on a deeper level than anyone making them ever intended, the world of late 20th and early 21st Century children’s cinematic content.
There are some movies I can’t take anymore. But there are some that make me appreciate just how thoughtful their creation was. If you watch something 100 times and parts of it get better, than it’s really something. The scene where Master Oogway ascends to the afterlife is pretty close to perfect.
What exactly makes a piece of two dimensional media with sound perfect is something I’ve spent more time on than most people. Finding Nemo is nearly perfect end to end. Albert Brooks actually is perfect in it. So are multiple scenes in Wall-E. Mandy Patinkin is perfect in The Princess Bride. That’s one of the few live action films that makes it into the rotation because if there were a live action film in which the characters, pace and dialogue are so perfect it’s as if they’re animated, it’s The Princess Bride. Rob Reiner should know that his film can be watched 200 times and the sword fighting dialogue doesn’t wilt.
“But, I promise I will not kill you until you reach the top.”
“That's VERY comforting, but I'm afraid you'll just have to wait.”
“I hate waiting.”
There have been nights where I’ve laid on his floor for four hours waiting for him to drift off as he cycles through his streaming services watching snippets of movies. And so I’m deeply grateful for some of the content. The things he selects aren’t random though. And that’s why I’m writing about it.
We don’t really know exactly what’s impacting Aidan’s cognitive development. He has tremendous spatial and physical intelligence and he has no problem figuring out many complex tasks. In some ways he follows directions much better than a typical 14 year old. In others, he lacks the context forming to allow him to do pretty basic things. We’ve had scans done of his brain. The imagery shows that everything is structurally sound. The activity is abnormal, but we don’t really know what that means. And of course, we don’t know what causes it. We know many things as humans. We don’t really know the brain though. Neurologists may disagree. I’ll listen when they can tell me what’s different about my son. And why.
A large part of his intellectual capacity seems to have been rerouted into sensory input. He has near eidetic memory when it comes to location. And he remembers the pitch and sound of the scenes in the movies he has watched. He sees them in his head when they’re not there. We can tell because he “leaves us” and acts them out.
But…they’re not random.
The things he finds perfect, the things he can’t stop watching, are deep visual and auditory works of designed art. Nearly everything he watches is animated. The real world can’t meet the standard. I don’t know how much he understands them as I do because we can’t discuss them. But there is some common ground with the people that are making this art and what’s going on inside of his head that is uninterrupted.
Whoever animated the peach blossom petals that carry Oogway off into eternity has created something that is beautiful in both my world and my son’s. And in that we are together. This agreement on beauty and creation is where I’m deeply trying to live more with him. And it’s where I think a huge part of the human experience lies.
GPT-3 might write poems. But I’m not sure it’s traversing the same mental highway that connects us. The artificial neural network is on the outside of Nagel’s What It’s Like to Be a Bat problem. It can mimic what the product of our imagination is. But it doesn’t have the ability to understand what it is like for us…to be us. It can’t cross the bridge of creativity to my son that Hans Zimmer does with his Kung Fu Panda Score because GPT-3 is not on the either side of it. And so there’s something core human about my son watching the animation that someone else has created on loop.
We can think of things as from the human experience, or of the human experience. The latter feels richer. And I’m not sure we close the gap by reducing the human patterns into math so easily. I know this sounds naive or overly humanistic. But I’ve got different goals for understanding how the human mind works than most of the folks trying to code one; most specifically what it’s like to be Aidan.