Love is Active in Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

A neighborhood is like a warm blanket or a soft embrace. It is the place to which we return and the place where people we care for exist. It is where we find comfort and love. It is where we feel safe. With Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Fred Rogers created such a space on television. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? invites the viewer to join the neighborhood of Mr. Rogers, a place where feelings and vulnerability are embraced.

Directed by Morgan Neville, the documentary film serves as a mosaic, composed of pieces of Mr. Rogers’ life. A narrative is cultivated through Mr. Rogers’ “neighbors,” his loved ones. These neighbors serve as storytellers to the viewer, as they share the wisdom that they gained from him. In an intimate and straight-forward manner, these interviewers personally convey what was special about Fred Rogers. Additionally, clips of Mr. Rogers himself pour life into the film. With a sparkle in his eye and an undeniable tenderness, he connects with each viewer.

“Music was my first language,” Mr. Rogers expressed. It would only be fitting that classical piano is what we hear as the film opens. Piano music is sprinkled throughout the film. Each time it is played, it is sparkling and colorful. This timeless music is paired with clips of children, or with images of Mr. Rogers himself enjoying a sunny day on a beach. This is a type of music which embodies all of the tenderness in the world. When we let this music wash over us, we can begin to understand the gentleness that Mr. Rogers embodied, the warmth that was his gift to the world.

In watching Won’t You Be My Neighbor? we are transported back to childhood. Mr. Rogers had a deep understanding of children, and his own inner child never left him. This is captured through the film’s component of animation. Through this, Mr. Rogers himself is represented by Daniel Striped Tiger, one of the puppets from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. This animation captures the curiosity of childhood perfectly, with Daniel waving to butterflies, playing with dragons, and winking at the sun. The viewer can climb into his headspace, so much that you feel like a child, wide-eyed and wondering.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? delves into the timely elements of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and provides uncanny parallels between Mr. Rogers’ messages and modern-day strife. In one episode, the character of King Friday the 13th is deeply afraid of change, and he threatens to build a wall around his castle in anger. The film takes clips such as this from the show and packages them neatly for us to take in and apply to today’s world.

Fred Rogers asked his friend François Clemmons, a black man, to be a part of the show, and to play a police officer. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? highlights Clemmons’ emotions and personal narrative in a way that we would never gauge from simply watching the television show. In an interview, Clemmons said that he was reluctant at first: to him, the police officer was the scariest part of the neighborhood. The film shows us clips of segregation from 1969, with hotel owners pouring chemicals into swimming pools, because they were forcing black people to leave the pool. The pair worked together and created a scene in which the two of them washed their feet together on a hot day. During that time, this was radical.

“I love you just the way you are” were words of Fred Rogers that many people held dearly. When Officer Clemmons was struggling to come out as gay, he needed to hear these words more than ever. The film portrays the relationship between Rogers and Clemmons as pure and loving. François Clemmons described Mr. Rogers as a surrogate father to him, someone who loved him intrinsically. This was something he had never experienced before.

In the words of Fred Rogers, “The greatest thing that we can do is to let somebody know that they are loved, and capable of loving.” This film, a curation of Mr. Rogers’ many moments of wisdom, feels like a cinematic hug. We all need to be reminded of our value, and Mr. Rogers consistently reminds us all that we do not need to do anything spectacular for people to love us. This film is completely human and serves as an outpouring of love and affirmation. It encourages us to communicate with our hearts, a timeless message that will certainly keep Mr. Rogers’ legacy alive.