Waking Life (2001)
Directed by Richard Linklater
Waking Life is about a young man in a persistent lucid dream-like state. The film follows its protagonist as he initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions that weave together issues like reality, free will, our relationships with others, and the meaning of life.
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Waking Life, written and directed by Richard Linklater (Slacker) is a visionary animated film of deep play that is stylistically innovative and spiritually rich in content.
Waking Life is the breathtakingly original new film by Richard Linklater, Austin, Tex.-based director of indie classics Slacker and Dazed and Confused.
He wanders from one person and place to another (something like the camera did in Linklater's first film, " Slacker ").
Waking Life's pace parallels Linklater's debut feature, Slacker; both unfold with similar oddball characters and neo-philosophers.
Like previous Linklater movies (Slacker [1991], the Proustian Dazed and Confused [1993], Before Sunrise [1995], even the lovably wayward The Newton Boys [1998], the only one of the director's films without a time-sensitive structure), Waking Life walks a deceptively simple path.
We recognize some of them: Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy , from Linklater's " Before Sunrise ," continue their conversation.
Richard Linklater is the writer or co-writer and director of Before Sunrise, Dazed and Confused, Slackers, and SubUrbia.
Like previous Linklater movies (Slacker [1991], the Proustian Dazed and Confused [1993], Before Sunrise [1995], even the lovably wayward The Newton Boys [1998], the only one of the director's films without a time-sensitive structure), Waking Life walks a deceptively simple path.
You might recognize it from his 1995 Before Sunrise, the best romantic comedy of the last decade, in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy star as an American and a Parisienne who meet en route to Vienna, spend 36 impulsive hours together, and fall in love.
It recalls director/screenwriter Linklater's first film, Slackers, which showed us a series of loosely linked people expressing views on everything from Madonna's pap smear to the assassination of William McKinley, and his later film, Before Sunrise, in which a young couple meets on a train and spend the rest of the movie walking around Vienna and talking about just about everything.
Linklater ("Slacker," "SubUrbia") shot the film on digital video with dozens of actors (some of note, some unknown) playing nameless denizens of the real world and of the kid's subconscious.
Helmer Linklater, known for his Gen-Xer works "Slacker," "Before Sunrise" and "Suburbia," goes the surreal route with his intellectual and artistic look into the world of dreams.
Waking Life really may not seem a film likely to come from Linklater, who directed Slacker, Dazed and Confused, and SubUrbia, but it is an obvious next step in the generation he seems so fond of.
Waking Life is the breathtakingly original new film by Richard Linklater, Austin, Tex.-based director of indie classics Slacker and Dazed and Confused.
Dazed and Confused's Wiley Wiggins is the protagonist, who may be in a perpetual dream state, or may be dead.
They are dreamed by one of Linklater's typically relaxed, quietly self-questioning heroes, played by Dazed and Confused's Wiley Wiggins.
Set up as the ongoing dream of one unnamed character (played/voiced by Wiley Wiggins, from Linklater's Dazed and Confused), the film was shot as live action in Austin, San Antonio, and New York City, with lightweight, handheld video cameras.
Like previous Linklater movies (Slacker [1991], the Proustian Dazed and Confused [1993], Before Sunrise [1995], even the lovably wayward The Newton Boys [1998], the only one of the director's films without a time-sensitive structure), Waking Life walks a deceptively simple path.
And you've got to hand it to Linklater, who is able to easily shift from the mainstream ("The Newton Boys") to the cutting edge.
After a short three-year hiatus, filmmaker Richard Linklater (whose previous outing was The Newton Boys) has returned to the world of cinema with the offbeat and ambitious Waking Life, an animated excursion through the dreams and philosophical musings of the main character.
After a large and fortunately forgettable misstep (1998's "The Newton Boys"), Richard Linklater is back in fine form -- maybe the finest yet.
(No one will bug him about The Newton Boys once they see this.)
(The kind you see in American movies from World War II, like The Clock (1945) in which Robert Walker as a soldier on leave meets Judy Garland in Penn Station and spends the day with her; the two bond so intensely they get married right away.)
Each of the numerous animators on the project put their own imprint on the rotoscope technique use - that is, animating live action film, something developed by Ralph Bakshi years ago with "Wizards" and "The Lord of the Rings".
The first film to extensively employ the technique of rotoscoping live-action images into animation since Ralph Bakshi's 1978 The Lord of the Rings, the method behind Waking Life's madness is a good deal more than a tripped-out psychedelic nightmare.
Bakshi uses rotoscoping, that is, a process by which live-action footage is animated by artists (much like Richard Linklater’s recent film, Waking Life).
Each of the numerous animators on the project put their own imprint on the rotoscope technique use - that is, animating live action film, something developed by Ralph Bakshi years ago with "Wizards" and "The Lord of the Rings".
The result is akin to the revolutionary rotoscoping used by Ralph Bakshi in "American Pop" with thirty different styles instead of one.
The mood of impassioned, questioning sympathy in Waking Life is similar to Godard's in his films from the sixties and seventies, especially La Chinoise, with its agitating intellectual renegades.
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From there, we move through a string of visions and encounters that includes a chamber group rehearsing the stark, properly dizzying tango score for the film itself; a scientist breathlessly elaborating a new paradigm shift in human evolution; a man trumpeting a metaphysical wake-up call over a loudspeaker as he cruises the streets of Austin; a monkey showing a film collage to a packed basement lecture hall; a man in a bar telling a story about the time he shot someone who tried to hold him up (if the story sounds familiar, that's because it's been told before in another movie: the man is Steve Prince, the subject of Scorsese's ferocious 1977 documentary American Boy (where he told the story the first time) and gun dealer in Taxi Driver.
He winds up back at the house where he began, and the presence of the material world itself suddenly becomes moving the house seems ineffably sad, like the early-20th century houses that Linda Manz sneaks past in the final moments of Days of Heaven, a movie by another phenomenologically-minded Texan.
But it made me think of both Chris Marker�s great 1983 Sans Soleil, a whirligig of images and reflections on the workings of memory, and James Toback�s 1990 The Big Bang, a documentary in which he brings together a cross-section of highly articulate people of different ages and from different walks of life and encourages them to talk about God and sex and anything else that happens to come up.
Speed Levitch, the philosophical tour guide from "The Cruise," is on a bridge giving another tour talk about the poet Lorca and the author D. H. Lawrence, and Speed muses on his opinion that one can find reality through one's dreams.
Linklater shot Waking Life on digital video with real actors, including Wiggins, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy (the stars of Linklater's Before Sunrise) and "Speed" Levitch (from the 1998 documentary The Cruise).
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We listen in on a series of talking heads who expound about life in far-less interesting ways than My Dinner with Andre.
It's like an admonishment to the audience, but it's not necessary; this fascinating experiment in animation and philosophizing has the same invigorating, something-new-under-the-sun crackle of "My Dinner With Andre."
When the questions are posed by representations (cartoon figures) of representations (characters in a film) of humanity, our perception of what washes out as a slacker version of My Dinner with Andre melded, if also at literal odds, with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is undermined and destabilized.
On the other hand, should Woody Allen ever rotoscope Annie Hall, Manhattan, or Crimes and Misdemeanors into an impressionistic animated feature, I’d watch it in a heartbeat.