Waking Life Reviewed

Matt Parks

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Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” is a film of ideas threaded together with the logic of dreams. It combines Linklater’s signature free-form, conversational, non-linear style and philosophical ambitions with an amazing innovation in animation technique.

The most immediately striking thing about Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” is how different it looks from other films of both the action and animated techniques. “Waking Life” was produced using a unique new animation technique called rotoscoping. In order to create what would become the animated footage that you see in the film, Linklater assembled a small film crew—himself and producer Tommy Pallotta as cameramen, and one sound person.

Using several consumer-level digital video cameras (Sony TRV900s and a PC1), Linklater shot the entire film as live action footage in 25 days. All of the digital live action footage was then downloaded onto Apple G4 computers, and a team of more than 30 digital artists began the task of computer “painting” over the live footage with software specially designed by Bob Sabiston .

Each animator was assigned to a specific character in the film, so that each artist would bring his or her own specific style to that character. Because the animation is done on top of live footage, rather than in place of it, rotoscoping produces an animation style that is fluid and impressionistic, that seems strangely “real,” and is quite different from the more conventional Disney and anime styles of animation.

The film is not satisfied with mere technical innovation, though. Instead of a conventional movie narrative story, the film’s action (like that of Linklater’s early films, “Slackers,” “Dazed and Confused, and “Before Sunrise”) is a meandering philosophical dialogue about the nature and meaning of life, drawing from the ideas of important thinkers such as Plato, Sartre, Aristotle, Nietzsche, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, W. B. Yeats, Francois Truffaut, and others. The film's nameless protagonist, (played by Wiley Wiggins) a college age young man just returned to his hometown. He wanders around, meets people who are familiar to him, and although some of these wanderings are clearly dreams, it’s not clear what happens in dream and what, if anything happens while he is awake.

As the film progresses, he becomes increasingly aware that much of this “waking life” is actually dream state, or is at least informed by dream life (there’s a flashback to childhood where a friend’s folding paper fortune-telling thing unfolds to show him "dream is destiny"). He complains to those he meets that although he knows it’s a dream, he can’t awaken. He wanders from place to place, person to person, conversation to conversation, encountering a variety of ideas, philosophies, digressions, beliefs, visions, and explanations. He begins by looking for answers, but discovers as he goes that the process he finds himself part of is more about possibilities than solutions. Asking the questions is more important than finding the answers.

At its heart, “Waking Life” is about the struggle to reconcile the imagined self with the self of received ideas, and a dialogic meditation on the role the ethereal imagination plays on the world of real life. Like another of the best films of 2001, David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” “Waking Life” defies the Hollywood Moviemaking template by refusing conventional objective, linear narrative structure and neat, dramatic resolutions. Instead, these films use a structure closer to a musical structure—the fugue—than conventional narrative structure.

Fugue is a compositional style in which an element is introduced by one part and successively taken up and developed by other parts of the composition. Using the fugue form as a structure for film allows filmmakers like Linklater and Lynch to circumvent traditional movie forms (as well as audience expectations) by raising some extremely complex philosophical and artistic questions, then reintroducing them in various permutations throughout the course of the film, all the while frustrating the audience’s desire for closure and definitions. By refusing to try to provide easy answers to the questions, “Waking Life” presents itself as a provocation to approach life differently rather than merely as a storytelling vehicle.

From www.soundofyouth.com

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