Movie Roundup: Autistic Representation(?) Edition

I recently came across this article on Autastic.com (a neurodivergent-led website for adult-identified autistic BIPOC, good stuff, check it out) that lists movies and TV shows featuring characters who are autistic or coded as such, and are women and/or minorities. Now, I pride myself on my familiarity with autistic representation in popular media, so imagine my surprise when, after going through the list, I realized I had seen only seven out of the 36 films and shows they mentioned! After that, my completist tendencies kicked in and said, "Challenge accepted" (I love checking things off lists), and I proceeded to sit down and binge-watch. Here's my progress thus far:

Chocolate

A Thai movie about an autistic girl who uses her exceptional martial arts skills to collect money owed to her dying mother from various gangs, this was obviously a low-budget, independent production (nothing wrong with that) that had, in my opinion, some awkward pacing but absolutely incredible fight scenes. Which, really, is kind of the point of a movie like this. I tried to find out if the star is actually autistic, but wasn't able to. My guess is not, but let me know if you know for sure.

Temple Grandin

This is a biopic about Temple Grandin (you know who she is, right?) that is based on a couple of her memoirs, including the fantastic Thinking in Pictures. Claire Danes, who I am quite sure is not autistic, portrays Temple, but apparently they met and Temple approved, so I assume we're all good there. Speaking of meeting Temple, did I mention that I met her some years ago at an autism conference in Portland? She autographed my copy of Thinking in Pictures, and I even gave her a copy of Joel Suzuki, Volume One and asked for her advice on how to promote my book. Her reply was something along the lines of, "Don't just focus exclusively on the autism part of it." Noted!

Jane Wants a Boyfriend

A sweet little rom-com about an autistic young woman who, well, wants a boyfriend (as they say in show biz, it does what it says on the tin) but is smothered by her well-meaning, overprotective older sister. As a fan of rom-coms, I liked this one, even though the actress playing Jane isn't actually autistic (but she is one-quarter Japanese, which I never would have guessed), and I found myself at certain points saying out loud to my TV, "you know, you don't necessarily have to set up autistic people with other autistic people." At least Kerry Magro was a consultant on the film.

Loop

This is a short film from Pixar about a couple of kids, one of whom is a non-verbal autistic girl named Renee, who go paddling at summer camp. Renee is performed by an actor named Madison Bandy, who is actually non-verbal and autistic, which makes this film the only one in this roundup with a confirmed autistic actor (hence, the "?" in the title of the post). The film also apparently used consultants from the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.

The Accountant 2

This one wasn't in the Autastic article, but I'm including it here because I just so happened to watch it before I saw the list and figured I might as well lump it in. I had a lot of the same thoughts about it as I did the original, which I wrote about in this blog post from 2016. And yes, there are flaws. But overall, I found it pretty entertaining, even though having some actually autistic actors would have been nice (although I suspect that there are a lot more autistic actors working in Hollywood than are letting on).

Speaking of which, if you want to see a film with an actual autistic actor playing an autistic lead character along with other autistic actors (some of whom are playing neurotypical characters!), check out a little something called Hold My Beer on YouTube...