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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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