If you like portrait documentaries about widely beloved individuals of yesteryear that give you a chance to cry nostalgically over your feelings of devotion and loss, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is extremely your shit. I watched this worshipful documentary about Fred Rogers, creator and star of the long-running children’s TV show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, in a packed audience of weepers, and didn’t even mind the wall-to-wall snuffling. That just shows director Morgan Neville, who won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for 20 Feet From Stardom, has got real talent.

Fred Rogers seems like he was an extremely decent guy, almost absurdly nice, like a real-life Ned Flanders. And how often can you say that about a conservative white Republican of very strong Protestant religious beliefs? The film treats him as a kind of unicorn, expressing amazement that such a unique creature ever existed.

And indeed it’s impressive what Rogers achieved, considering what an odd duck he was. His sense of childhood alienation is illustrated in the film with beautiful animated sequences by Ariel Costa and Rodrigo Miguel Rangel. They show Rogers as the meek and sensitive character of the hand-puppet alter ego he invented for the TV show, Daniel Striped Tiger. (Striped is pronounced “Stri-ped,” with an old-fashioned emphasis on the last syllable.) A lonely, sickly, bullied boy from a wealthy family, cruelly nicknamed “Fat Freddie,” he grew up aspiring to a traditional Presbyterian ministry until he found, early in his adult life, a less traditional mission: to use television as a tool that would help children negotiate a difficult world.