Review of Waking Life (2001) by Manny C — 12 Jan 2011

Have you ever seen a movie as strikingly original as Richard Linklater's Waking Life. This is a film that dares you to open your mind to ne possibilities of storytelling. It's essentially a plot-less film that discusses questions of existence, the universe, even Andre Bazin film theory.

Texas-born director Linklater (the auteur behind indie classics like Slacker and Before Sunrise) masters a filmmaking technique called Roto-scoping, in which actors are filmed live and then animated over, that allows his movie to seemingly transform into anything and everything. What results is something like a dream, where words literally fly from the mouth and drift away.

The film follows Wiley Wiggins (originally seen in Linklater's Dazed and Confused) as he meander from place to place, person to person, waxing philosophic with a bevy of colorful characters, literally and figuratively. These include Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprising their roles as lovers from Before Sunrise, as well as Timothy 'Speed' Levitch and even Steven Soderbergh.

To achieve this stream-of-conscience effect, Linklater assigned a different animator to each character and vignette and what results is a breathtaking thing of beauty. This is head-tripping that's right up there with 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the Yellow Submarine, and to me that's high praise.

And though Linklater would use the same technique five years later to adapt Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, his film is no gimmick. Waking Life allows you to rest easy while tackling huge, unanswerable questions. It shouldn't work but damn it, it does.