Waking Life

Waking Life
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Richard Linklater
Produced by	Tommy Pallotta Jonah Smith Anne Walker-McBay Palmer West
Written by	Richard Linklater
Starring	Wile E. Wiggins Kim Krizan Lorelei Linklater Trevor Jack Brooks Timothy "Speed" Levitch Alex Jones
Music by	Glover Gill
Cinematography	Richard Linklater Tommy Pallotta
Editing by	Sandra Adair
Distributed by	Fox Searchlight Pictures
Release date(s)	January 23, 2001
Running time	99 min.
Language	English

Waking Life is a digitally enhanced live action rotoscoped film, directed by Richard Linklater and released in 2001. The entire film was shot using digital video and then a team of artists using computers drew stylized lines and colors over each frame. This technique is similar in some respects to the rotoscope style of 1970s filmmaker Ralph Bakshi. Rotoscoping itself, however, was not Bakshi's invention, but that of experimental silent film maker Max Fleischer, who patented the process in 1917.^[1]

The title is a reference to George Santayana's maxim that "[s]anity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."^[2]

Plot

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. Along the way the film touches on other topics including existentialism, situationist politics, posthumanity, the film theory of André Bazin, and on lucid dreaming itself.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their characters from Before Sunrise in one scene.^[3][4]

Cast

Wiley Wiggins plays the protagonist. The film features appearances from a wide range of actors and non-actors, including David Sosa, Eamonn Healy, Robert C. Solomon, Speed Levitch, Adam Goldberg, Nicky Katt, Alex Jones, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Prince, and Louis Black.^[5]

Production

Adding to the dream-like effect, the film used an innovative animation technique based on rotoscoping. Animators overlaid live action footage (shot by Linklater) with animation that roughly approximates the images actually filmed.^[6] A variety of artists were employed, so the feel of the movie continually changes, and gets stranger as time goes on. The result is a surreal, shifting dreamscape.

The animators used inexpensive "off-the-shelf" Apple Macintosh computers. The film was mostly produced using Rotoshop, a custom-made rotoscoping program that creates blends between keyframe vector shapes (the name is a play on the popular bitmap graphics editing software called Photoshop, which also makes use of virtual "layers"), and created specifically for the production by Bob Sabiston. Linklater would again use this animation method for his 2006 film A Scanner Darkly.

Reception

Critical reaction to Waking Life has been mostly positive. It holds a rating of 80% across 137 reviews on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes—with critical consensus that "[t]he talky, animated Waking Life is a unique, cerebral experience"—and an average score of 82 out of 100 ("universal acclaim") on Metacritic, based on thirty-one reviews.^[7][8] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four, describing it as "a cold shower of bracing, clarifying ideas."^[9] Ebert later included the film on his ongoing list of "Great Movies".^[10] Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly awarded the film an "A" rating, calling it "a work of cinematic art in which form and structure pursues the logic-defying (parallel) subjects of dreaming and moviegoing",^[11] while Stephen Holden of The New York Times said it was "so verbally dexterous and visually innovative that you can't absorb it unless you have all your wits about you".^[12]

Conversely, J. Hoberman of The Village Voice felt that Waking Life "doesn't leave you in a dream ... so much as it traps you in an endless bull session".^[13] Frank Lovece felt the film was "beautifully drawn" but called its content "pedantic navel-gazing".^[14] Penn Fiftine from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune took exception to the film's "endless irritating nonsense",^{[citation needed]} while Jonny Manx of the Philadelphia Examiner memorably suggests that "anyone who likes this movie is probably a stork with friends who exclusively are storks with whom they can discuss such storky exploits as their having watched this storky film directed by and starring a whole bunch of storks that talk about a bunch of storks and their storky ideas and thoughts about storky things that happened to them or some other storks they know or have heard about".^{[citation needed]}

Nominated for numerous awards, mainly for its technical achievements, Waking Life won the National Society of Film Critics award for "Best Experimental Film," the New York Film Critics Circle award for "Best Animated Film", and the "CinemAvvenire" award at the Venice Film Festival for "Best Film". It was also nominated for the Golden Lion, the festival's main award.

Soundtrack

Soundtrack cover

The Waking Life OST was performed and written by Glover Gill and the Tosca Tango Orchestra, except for one piece written by Frédéric Chopin and another by Julian Plaza, and was relatively successful. Featuring the nuevo tango style, it bills itself "the 21st Century Tango." Influence for the compositions stem from the Argentine "father of new tango" Ástor Piazzolla. The actual tango scores are revised renditions of Ástor Piazzolla's works.

DVD

The film was released on DVD in North America on May 7, 2002. Special features included several commentaries, documentaries, interviews and deleted scenes, as well as the short film Snack and Drink. A bare-bones DVD with no special features was released on Region 2 on February 24, 2003.

See also

• Dream argument
• Dream art
• Existentialism
• Lucid dreaming
• Oneironaut
• Simulated reality

Footnotes

References

• Jones, Kent (2007). Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. pp. 76–78. ISBN 0819568449. 
• Rosenbaum, Jonathan (2004). "Good Vibrations". Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801878403. 

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Waking Life

• Waking Life at the Internet Movie Database
• Waking Life at Allmovie
• Waking Life at Rotten Tomatoes