Waking Life

• 1. Introduction

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  Waking Life, Richard Linklater's 2001 animated film, opens with a boy floating upward from a driveway into the sky. It is the first signal that gravity here does not apply. The film's unnamed protagonist drifts through a succession of philosophical conversations, unable to wake up, unable to tell whether any moment he inhabits is real. By the time the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001, Linklater had been carrying the idea for roughly two decades. What took him so long? And why did he need animation to tell a story that, on the surface, is just people talking in rooms? The answers turn out to hinge on a single conviction: that a realistic film about unreality must itself be an unreality.

• 2. A Dream of Talking

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  Wiley Wiggins plays the protagonist, a young man with no name and no clear destination. He wanders through encounters with scholars, artists, restaurant-goers, and friends, all of them willing, even eager, to hold forth on metaphysics, free will, social philosophy, and the meaning of life. Some scenes cut away from him entirely, resting on a couple or a solitary figure mid-monologue, as though the film itself forgets to follow him. The protagonist starts out as a quiet observer. His posture changes after a woman approaches him unexpectedly and shares her creative ideas with him. He reminds himself, immediately afterward, that she is a figment of his own dreaming imagination. From that point he begins to engage more openly, though despair starts to shadow the conversations. His final talk is with a character played by Linklater himself, someone the protagonist had briefly crossed paths with earlier. That character advances the idea that reality may be only a single instant, falsely interpreted as time, and that dreams offer a glimpse into something infinite. The film's last image returns to the floating boy from the opening: the protagonist reaches for a car door handle, is lifted above the vehicle and the trees, and rises into a blue sky until he disappears.

• 3. The Rotoscope Machine

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  Linklater and a collaborator shot the live-action footage over six weeks beginning in August 1999, using a Mini DV camera. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy appear in one scene, reprising Jesse and Celine from Before Sunrise (1995). Once that footage existed, a team of animators went to work layering drawn animation directly over the recorded images. The technique is called rotoscoping, and its effect is something between a photograph and a painting. Because Linklater hired a variety of different artists, no two sequences look quite alike. The film's dreamscape shifts and ripples as the contributors change. The software at the center of the process was Rotoshop, a rotoscoping program built specifically for this production by Bob Sabiston. It generates blends between key frame vector shapes and uses virtual layers. The animators worked on standard Apple Macintosh computers. Linklater returned to the same method five years later for his 2006 film A Scanner Darkly.

• 4. An Idea Twenty Years in the Making

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  In a 2001 interview, Linklater traced the film's origins to a time before he was even interested in cinema, placing the initial idea roughly twenty years earlier. For a long stretch he considered it unworkable, describing it as too blunt and too realistic. The formulation he eventually landed on resolved that tension: to make a realistic film about an unreality, the film itself had to be a realistic unreality. The parallels to his 1990 film Slacker run through Waking Life, and both pictures share a structural looseness that favors encounter over plot. The live-action footage shot in 1999 later turned up as extra material on the DVD release, giving viewers a way to see the film beneath the film. That layering, image over image, seems almost inevitable given how long the project gestated and how many passes it required before it could become what Linklater had been imagining.

• 5. Critical Response

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  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave Waking Life four stars out of four and called it "a cold shower of bracing, clarifying ideas." He later placed it on his list of Great Movies. Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly awarded it an A rating, describing it as "a work of cinematic art in which form and structure pursue the logic-defying (parallel) subjects of dreaming and moviegoing." The New York Times ran two assessments: Stephen Holden called the film "so verbally dexterous and visually innovative that you can't absorb it unless you have all your wits about you," while Dave Kehr found it "lovely, fluid, funny" and said it "never feels heavy or over-ambitious." On Rotten Tomatoes, the film collected an approval rating of 81% from 145 reviews, with an average score of 7.40 out of 10. Metacritic placed it at 82 out of 100 based on 31 reviews, a level it labels universal acclaim. Not everyone agreed. J. Hoberman of The Village Voice wrote that the film traps the viewer in an endless bull session rather than a dream, and Frank Lovece praised its visual craft while calling its content pedantic navel-gazing. Despite strong reviews, the film underperformed at the box office.

• 6. Awards and Legacy

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  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 for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival. At Venice it was also nominated for the Golden Lion, the festival's top honor. The American Film Institute nominated it as an animation film in its 2008 AFI's 10 Top 10 list. The film's inclusion of Alex Jones became a separate point of conversation years later. In a 2018 interview with IndieWire, Linklater said he thought Jones was "kind of funny" at the time and never imagined he would one day be taken seriously. The home media release in North America arrived in 2002 on VHS and DVD, with extras including commentaries, documentaries, and the short film Snack and Drink. A bare-bones Region 2 disc followed in 2003, and a Blu-ray appeared in Germany and the UK. The soundtrack, performed and written by Glover Gill and the Tosca Tango Orchestra, draws on the nuevo tango style it bills as "the 21st Century Tango," with an influence traced to Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, the father of new tango, alongside Frederic Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9, No. 2.