Waking Life is an American animated film (rotoscoped based on live action), 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.

The film focuses on the nature of dreams, consciousness, and existentialism.^[2] The title is a reference to philosopher George Santayana's maxim: "Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."^[3]

Plot[link]

Waking Life is about an unnamed^[2] young man in a persistent dream-like state that eventually progresses to lucidity. He initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions of issues such as reality, free will, the relationship of the subject 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 lucid dreaming itself. By the end, the protagonist feels trapped by his perpetual dream, broken up only by unending false awakenings. His final conversation with a dream character reveals that reality may be only a single instant which the individual consciousness interprets falsely as time (and, thus, life) until a level of understanding is achieved that may allow the individual to break free from the illusion.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their characters from Before Sunrise in one scene.^[4][5]

Cast[link]

• Wiley Wiggins plays the protagonist.

The film features appearances from a wide range of actors and non-actors including:

• Eamonn Healy
• Speed Levitch
• Adam Goldberg
• Nicky Katt
• Alex Jones
• Steven Soderbergh
• Ethan Hawke
• Julie Delpy
• Steven Prince
• Caveh Zahedi

As well as American philosophers and writers:

• Louis H. Mackey
• David Sosa
• Robert C. Solomon
• Kim Krizan

Production[link]

Adding to the dream-like effect, the film used an animation technique based on rotoscoping.^[6] Animators overlaid live action footage (shot by Linklater) with animation that roughly approximates the images actually filmed.^[6][7] 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.^[8] 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 popular bitmap graphics editing software 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.

Release[link]

Waking Life premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001, and was given a limited release in the United States on October 19, 2001.

Reception[link]

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.^[9][10] 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."^[11] Ebert later included the film on his ongoing list of "Great Movies."^[12] 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,"^[13] 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."^[14] Dave Kehr of The New York Times found the film to be "lovely, fluid, funny" and stated that it "never feels heavy or over-ambitious."^[2]

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."^[15] Frank Lovece felt the film was "beautifully drawn" but called its content "pedantic navel-gazing."^[16]

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.

The American Film Institute nominated Waking Life for its Top 10 Animated Films list.^[17]

Home media[link]

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

Soundtrack[link]

The Waking Life OST was performed and written by Glover Gill and the Tosca Tango Orchestra, except for Frédéric Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9, No. 2. The soundtrack was relatively successful. Featuring the nuevo tango style, it bills itself "the 21st Century Tango." The tango contributions were influenced by the music of the Argentine "father of new tango" Ástor Piazzolla.

The trance act called 1200 Micrograms samples lines from the movie Waking Life in their song:"Acid for Nothing"; a trance remix of Dire Straits' Money for Nothing.

See also[link]

• Dream argument
• Dream art
• Oneironaut
• Simulated reality

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

• Jones, Kent (2007). Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. pp. 76–78. ISBN 0-8195-6844-9. 
• Rosenbaum, Jonathan (2004). "Good Vibrations". Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-7840-3. 

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Waking Life

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