Michelangelo
To promote the new live-action adaptation of Lilo & Stitch, Disney Italia has created a new video where the titular alien spends some time at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Florence. Perhaps unintentionally, Disney has highlighted one of the themes of the original film: neurodiversity.
In the new promotional video, the alien Stitch crashes his spacecraft in Florence and darts into the Gallerie dell’Accademia, causing chaos for staff and visitors alike. However, he comes across a hallway, at the end of which is Michelangelo’s David, the museum’s star attraction. He becomes calm and contemplative in admiring the work and then gains inspiration. He approaches a block of marble, climbing all over it to bite off pieces to sculpt his own masterpiece. This sculpture, showing Stitch in Greco-Roman robes, now sits at the Gallerie dell’Accademia to promote the film and the museum. It will remain there until June 20th. The intent, it seems, is to highlight the new film to museum visitors and promote Italian culture to the movie’s younger audience. However, there’s a connection between Stitch and Michelangelo’s David that the museum and Disney may not have considered when they pitched the video idea.
Disney originally released Lilo & Stitch in 2002. This was immediately after the great success of the 1990s Disney Renaissance. However, following the release of Tarzan in 1999, Disney animated films went off in a new direction. For the next decade, Disney would put out films featuring experimental combinations of 2D and 3D animation. The screenplays were also completely original for the most part. This broke from Disney’s normal practice of retelling popular stories and folk tales. In my opinion, the holy trinity from this era is Treasure Planet, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and Lilo & Stitch. These were movies that I watched endlessly, enjoying what they had to offer even before they were considered cult classics decades later. However, it wasn’t until a year ago that I gained a far more robust appreciation for Lilo & Stitch. This is when I learned that while the film might be about the unlikely friendship between a Hawaiian girl and a lab-grown chaos gremlin, it is also about the struggles of living with neurodiversity and the importance of found family.
The sculpture of Stitch at the Gallerie dell’Accademia
Nowadays, the character of Lilo is recognized as exhibiting characteristics of high-functioning autism. These include her difficulty making friends, her fixation on special interests like photography and the music of Elvis Presley, and her blunt forms of communication, specifically her inability to understand or employ sarcasm or euphemistic language when a delicate situation would call for it. While Lilo is a direct example of neurodivergent representation, Stitch serves the same purpose more metaphorically. Stitch often scares people away because of his impulses to destroy and cause chaos. However, Lilo’s ability to see good in him conveys a far more profound message than expected from a children’s movie. Lilo & Stitch teaches us that you are more than just a diagnosis. Even if you are characterized by a list of symptoms from a medical or psychological perspective, that doesn’t define who you are, nor is it a predictor of one’s ability to make friends, lead a robust social life, and engage in creative activities. For a real-life example, I could talk about myself and my own experiences as a neurodivergent person. I could also talk about the many people I know who live very full, vibrant lives with high-functioning autism. But the new Disney promotional video has already highlighted one of the greatest neurodivergent icons of the past millennium: Michelangelo.
The arts seem like a natural place for a neurodivergent person. A strict routine, attention to detail, and a hyperfixation of special interests all work towards the makings of a great artist. Some have theorized that painters like Georgia O’Keeffe, Edvard Munch, and Vincent van Gogh may have had autism to certain degrees. It is now somewhat accepted that Michelangelo Buonarroti was neurodivergent based on descriptions from his contemporaries. In 2004, psychologists and autism specialists Muhammad Arshad and Michael Fitzgerald co-authored a short paper discussing how Michelangelo displayed signs of having high-functioning autism. They list these signs as including a “single-minded work routine, unusual lifestyle, limited interests, poor social and communication skills, and various issues of life control”. They compare his behavior to other prominent artistic and intellectual figures believed to be neurodivergent, such as Isaac Newton and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Michelangelo’s contemporaries describe him as somewhat of an antisocial loner. However, in his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari remarks that this aversion to social interaction was not because of a dislike of others. Instead, Vasari wrote that Michelangelo preferred to focus on his work, and that to be as great an artist as Michelangelo, one “must shun the society of others. In fact, a man who gives his time to the problems of art is never alone and never lacks food for thought, and those who attribute an artist’s love of solitude to outlandish and eccentricity are mistaken”. This very closely describes a neurodivergent person’s preoccupation with a particular interest, which for Michelangelo was sculpture. He also developed a strict routine and engaged in somewhat unusual habits. His hyperfixation would be so strong that he would often go without bathing or changing his clothes for days while working on a project. One of his biographers, Ascanio Condivi, wrote that he would wear his boots continuously, even to bed, to the point that “subsequently along with his boots, he sloughed off his skin, like a snake’s.”
Today, neurodiversity has become more and more accepted by the broader public. People with different manners of perception and expression often produce imaginative new ideas and enrich fields like science, technology, and the arts. Efforts to understand the ways neurodivergent people operate, whether through the disability rights movement or representation in popular media, have led to greater humanization and acceptance. However, many still hold harmful, outdated views. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an infamous science denier and the current U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, recently made appalling statements about people with autism. He said that autism destroys a person since they “will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” I, and many people I know, are living proof that this is simply not true. Perhaps if Kennedy had gotten his information from real life instead of Rain Man, there would have been a bit more empathy in his approach. Or, even better, he should understand that neurodiversity leads to great contributions to human progress, something he could learn not just through Lilo & Stitch but the work of Michelangelo and all other great neurodivergent artists.