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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19 films that influenced Waking Life
What critics say influenced Waking Life
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.
(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".
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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.
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.
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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).