This animated film follows a young man who seems to be caught in a perpetual dream-state and no matter how many times he thinks he’s woken up, he soon realizes that he’s immersed into yet another dream.
As he tries to make sense of this unreality and to find a way to actually wake up, he meets all manner of people who offer a slice of their view on a variety of topics, including the nature of free will versus pre-determined physical laws, state control versus individualism, hope versus apathy and despair, God versus the Devil, reality versus perception, and a whole lot more besides.
Waking Life Animation
The choice of animation here was an inspired one – how better to show this persistent state of dreaming than through a series of disparate visual techniques, created by a medley of artists?
Live action footage forms the basis for the animation, which is rendered and layered over the footage via a technique the creators called rotoscoping – not dissimilar to effects used by common PC programmes such as Photoshop. The effect is surreal and stunning, utterly detached and yet eerily realistic. It’s a feast for the eyes which won the film several technical awards.
Waking Life Cast
None of the characters in the film are given names and the cast includes a long list of contributors. You’ll easily recognize the likes of Ethan Hawke through the animation but the most significant point of the cast is in their reading of the material. Predominantly hidden by the animation, they seem liberated to fully express themselves through the lengthy dialogue.
Consequently, the script is beautifully read by everyone involved, feeling perfectly natural and intuitive despite the sometimes complicated themes. This helps the film's deep sense of authenticity and realism.
Waking Life Director Richard Linklater and the Screenplay
Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, A Scanner Darkly) has put together a phenomenal script.
Not since Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (and to a lesser degree Darren Aronofsky’s Pi and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell animé films) has a script been so bold as to delve unrelentingly into philosophical subject matters. Rosencrantz is a – slightly – more cohesive overall production, with a lot of supplemental humour, but that’s to be expected where Waking Life presents a dreamworld in which cohesiveness would only work against the so-called mis-en-scene.
There are so many great stand-alone lines and speeches that they can be impossible to digest before you’re being fed more of the same.
The script was based on a series of singular discussions, which clearly shows through, making this not so much a film than a dialogue-driven exploration of it’s subject matters. Hence, Waking Life may be best watched through individual scenes and repeated viewings will help ingraine the information.
Waking Life Summary
The trouble with being given information of this ilk, however, is the same as which has stifled intellectualism in modern literature. Namely, that unless you’ve already spent many long hours reading and pondering over these themes and questions yourself, it can be extremely difficult to follow.
That’s not to say, however, that anyone who just gives it the time and thought required won’t come away from Waking Life with new insight into many of the questions posed. It’s a mental workout that’s all too rarely supplied by films.
Yes, the vast majority of us turn to films for entertainment, to take a break from the daily routines, but if all we ever get is a little entertainment from films, and if all we ever expect from films is that entertainment, then films too become nothing more than routine.
Waking Life and film-makers like Richard Linklater offer something different, something that can take you away from predictability by stimulating the brain matter that most Hollywood studios (heck, even governments) would rather you didn’t use. These are the thoughts that demand more of you and from those whose work you ingest; the thoughts that can ultimately change the way someone looks at the world - and when that happens, lo and behold, the world itself becomes a different place and that is a real break from the routine.
- Producers: Tommy Pallotta, Jonah Smith, Anne Walker-McBay, Palmer West
- Director: Richard Linklater
- Screenplay: Richard Linklater
- Starring: Wiley Wiggins, Timothy Levitch, Alex Jones, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Richard Linklater
- Released: January 2001 by Fox Searchlight Pictures
- Runnig Time: 99 mins
