Waking Life

Last night I decided to watch "Waking Life," a film by Richard Linklater ("Dazed and Confused," "School of Rock"). It's a sort of animated film using rotoscope, meaning that it was shot with actors and then animated over.

The film stars Wiley Wiggins (Mitch Kramer in "Dazed and Confused") as the Dreamer. The movie basically follows the Dreamer from one conversation to the next, making it comparable to Linklater's "Slacker" or even "Dazed and Confused." Wiggin's character is involved in some of the conversations, while the other he seems to be watching from afar, which is something common in dreams. The movie is a dream from beginning to end, featuring false awakenings and surrealistic moments. The Dreamer wants to wake up, but finds that he keeps going deeper into his lucid dream.

The overall reality is strange in this movie. For example, one character talks about the human body being mostly water while water starts to fill up his outline. Another character becomes redder and redder as he becomes angrier.

The conversations range in their topics, including lucid dreaming, existentialism, and even politics. Many of the conversations were interesting to listen to, but not all of them stick as Linklater throws each one at you, one after the other. The one that really stuck with me featured Julie Deply and Ethan Hawke playing their characters from "Before Sunrise." In this scene, they touch upon dreams and life after death, and the connection between the two topics.

 I think that the movie is well made and interesting and leaves us with some interesting concepts and ideas, which movies should do, but I feel that it goes on for too long and some scenes were boring enough that they could have been cut out entirely. "Waking Life" would have made been better as a series of shorts in my opinion.

Here's one scene that I really enjoyed (the man with the ukelele is the part I am talking about).

And here's the trailer.