We are living through what is surely a golden age of documentary film, and a remarkable new example is Life, Animated. You may tune me out if I tell you that this moving and profound film is in part an investigation of what it means to be human, and in part a meditation on narrative itself—I may tune me out—but that is true in the best, least precious way possible, so help me God.

Directed by Roger Ross Williams, Life, Animated is based on the 2014 family memoir of the same name by the Pulitzer Prize-winning political journalist Ron Suskind. Both tell the story of how his autistic son, Owen, disappeared inside a neurological maze when he was not quite three years old and re-emerged, over a long period of time, guided by his obsession with Disney animation. As the film notes, cartoons, with their exaggerated facial expressions, are easier to “read” than live-action movies, or real life, for people with autism, who can have difficulty picking up emotional cues.

For Owen, the Disney canon served as a kind of life primer. He was six and a half and hadn’t spoken a real sentence in years when, out of the blue, he remarked of his older brother, Walter, who was feeling sad on his birthday, “Walter doesn’t want to grow up, like Mowgli or Peter Pan”—an astonishingly perceptive insight for any kid, let alone one at a cognitive remove. Not only did Owen re-discover language and empathy through Disney, but the cartoons also gave him a sense of purpose and belonging in the world, because of his deep identification with the “sidekick” characters—the Sebastians, Lumières, Timons, and Pumbaas—who help Disney princesses and princes “fulfill their destinies,” as Owen likes to say, on their “heroes’ journeys.” This almost religious bond between boy and archetype is illuminated with sensitivity (and a mostly light touch) in an animated sequence based on a story written and illustrated by Owen himself, “The Land of the Lost Sidekicks.” It’s got enough pain, hope, and yearning to equal just about any Disney picture.

Today, at 25, Owen lives in a supported community, has good friends, and works in a movie theater—a job he loves, his father says, adding, “How could he not? Movie theaters are holy places to this guy.” (He is also a big fan of the Star Wars saga and Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.) Owen was anxious before he watched Life, Animated for the first time, but he enjoyed the film and afterward saw himself in a new light: a sidekick who had triumphed on a hero’s journey of his own.