Imagination is a collaborative experimental film effort by brothers Eric and Jeffrey Leiser, which combines hand-drawn animation, stop-motion puppet animation, pixilation, and time-lapse techniques (by director/animator Eric) with a haunting musical score (by composer Jeffrey). They co-wrote the story about a neuro-psychologist's attempts to understand two twin girls: Anna, who is diagnosed with a rare form of autism called Asperger's, and Sarah, who is diagnosed as legally blind. The girls connect with each other through the realm of their imaginations, expressed through surreal animated imagery. Most of the film consists of using these abstract dreamscapes to show a window into how the girls experience their world, and other dialogue scenes of the psychologist with the girls' parents tie the story together.
The idea behind this film resonated with me personally, given that I am not only a stop-motion animator, but also have a younger brother with autism. Many autistic children, such as those my mother works with as a special education teacher, are non-verbal, but my brother Jonathan is of a higher functioning kind, very similar to Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man. I often wish I could enter my brother's brain and see how differently he sees the world around him, so I appreciate how Imagination uses animation to suggest this very idea. Leiser's animation, inspired by the work of Czech stop-motion legend Jan Svankmeyer, also resonates with spiritual symbolism, including the recurring appearance of a white fawn or stag. The white stag is a traditional symbol of Christ which hearkens back to the medieval myth of St. Eustace, and has been alluded to in contemporary myths like Narnia and the Harry Potter series. In my own experience with autism, I believe that there is a direct connection these children have which possibly brings them into a very close intimacy with the spiritual realm. It's possible, in my view, that people with autism and Asperger's have keys to certain doors in the human brain that for the rest of us are simply locked. (My brother, on occasion, used to wander around the house repeating to himself that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God." To him, though he may not understand the theological implications behind this, it's simply a fact that he understands in his own way I often wonder if he understands it better than the rest of us.)
The idea behind this film resonated with me personally, given that I am not only a stop-motion animator, but also have a younger brother with autism. Many autistic children, such as those my mother works with as a special education teacher, are non-verbal, but my brother Jonathan is of a higher functioning kind, very similar to Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man. I often wish I could enter my brother's brain and see how differently he sees the world around him, so I appreciate how Imagination uses animation to suggest this very idea. Leiser's animation, inspired by the work of Czech stop-motion legend Jan Svankmeyer, also resonates with spiritual symbolism, including the recurring appearance of a white fawn or stag. The white stag is a traditional symbol of Christ which hearkens back to the medieval myth of St. Eustace, and has been alluded to in contemporary myths like Narnia and the Harry Potter series. In my own experience with autism, I believe that there is a direct connection these children have which possibly brings them into a very close intimacy with the spiritual realm. It's possible, in my view, that people with autism and Asperger's have keys to certain doors in the human brain that for the rest of us are simply locked. (My brother, on occasion, used to wander around the house repeating to himself that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God." To him, though he may not understand the theological implications behind this, it's simply a fact that he understands in his own way I often wonder if he understands it better than the rest of us.)