“I see this as a realistic film about an unreality. The gestures, the sound, the human expressions all seem real, but reality is re-interpreted artistically. It becomes a kind of moving painting.” -Richard Linklater, Wired magazine 
We sat in a dark room. The kitchen light flickered as everyone waited in silence to watch some movie Jake and his girlfriend were raving about.
Jake stood before us; a young crowd of punks, miscreants and arty types seated on couches and the floor. He bent down and carefully placed the disc in the player, stood back up, reached for his lighter… and inhaled a huge bong hit. Jake exhaled a long plume of smoke as he spoke to us:
“Ahem. {cough} I just want to warn you guys that this shit is heavy. The content is kind of hard to follow the first time you watch it. But it’s awesome.”
Jake pressed play and the film began.
We watched in rapt silence, awestruck from beginning to end. We all wondered what the hell just happened. Jake sent us on the craziest trip of our lives, but none of us had eaten LSD.
Inside the mindscape
Waking Life is about a dream experience that weaves science, history, and philosophy into a mesmerizing parade of sensory input. The film combines existentialism and other themes with visually stunning animation.
Director Richard Linklater shot the entire movie using a handheld camera. After completing the live-action footage, he hired a team of artists to paint over each frame using a technique called rotoscoping. The result is realistic animation – an effect Linklater describes as a “mindscape”.
The main character (Wiley Wiggins) doesn’t know his own name or identity, but viewers watch him float through various scenes where he encounters dream characters. The characters eventually begin to talk about lucid dreams and he realizes what’s happening. He discovers he’s trapped in a dream and fears he’ll never wake up.
Linklater’s handheld camera magic enhances the surrealism; the camera often pans into scenes at weird angles – zooming into rooms, zipping across an orchestra scene, floating over rooftops. Linklater and his crew shot footage from a hot air balloon to capture scenes where the main character floats through the sky over suburban neighborhoods.
As a viewer, you become absorbed in the wild visual flow while attempting to follow complex verbal insight with your ears. Classical music and tango heighten the beauty during scene transitions.
The major theme is awareness; accepting the moment and making the best of a situation within our limited toolbox. The film showcases activists, teachers, and thinkers of all ages. People in different phases of life may take different lessons away from this film.
You are the main character
Waking Life boasts many achievements, but the most impressive is the way Linklater pulls you into the film. The main character doesn’t remember his own name or identity; he could be anyone. He could be you.
One character tells our young protagonist that the image of himself that he views inside the dream is only a “mental model”.
The dream characters directly address your thoughts and feelings about the movie as you watch. It’s part of the film’s spooky genius. In one scene, a blonde lady (Kim Krizan) speaks about the history of communication and the difficulty of expressing abstract emotion:
“So much of our experience is intangible, so much of what we perceive cannot be expressed – it’s unspeakable. And yet when we communicate with each other and we feel that we have connected, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion… and that feeling might be transient, but I think it’s what we live for.”
As you watch and listen, you experience what she’s talking about. The visual and thematic elements coming at you in this film are unspeakable.
She relates directly to your experience as a viewer, and she simultaneously provides insight into something important in your life. She addresses all those clusters of emotion in the past; times of trauma or perhaps elation when your personal experience escalated beyond what you could express in words.
She also delivers you into the “spiritual communion” aspect of her speech. You feel an uplift because she’s communicating a new insight into your mind. Here’s a human being expressing something either forgotten or never known by me… but now I know… or… maybe I remember. Collective conscsiousness.
Your brain lights up, electrical impulses dancing around as this stream of information enters the “conduit” she discusses. The animator illustrates your experience on-screen by drawing a crude visual conduit.
This is your dream.
This is also the brilliance inside the mind of Richard Linklater.
I read the script (found here) and realized the script is amazing on its own. Watching the film, however, is an additional layer of experiences and emotions that words on a page cannot replicate. Again, this exact issue is addressed in a scene called the “Holy Moment”.
Later on, the main character discusses his dream experiences with a new dream character. He describes feeling engaged in an active process. This confuses him because he’s been silent and passive during the dream. She responds that listening is not necessarily a passive act. Once again, this is also about your viewing experience.
Moving paintings – the dream comes to life
“This film uses dreams as a kind of operating system for the narrative, the hitch for most of the ideas. The realism of live-action film would have canceled out the ideas… This style of animation allows you to see a different state of reality.” –Rick Linklater, Wired Magazine
“It’s different from traditional animation; it’s on the computer, but it still involves a lot of hand drawing…it’s pleasing for people to recognize real motion and real expression but have this added layer of an artist’s sensibility. I wanted a very painterly look. With rotoscoping, you’re not required to come up with any original motions. You have to draw people’s facial expressions, have a good sense of color balance and design; all the skills that painters have.” – Bob Sabiston, Rotoshop creator and Waking Life Art Director
Animators have used rotoscoping since 1915, but Waking Life’s animators used proprietary rotoscoping software created by Linklater’s friend and collaborator, Bob Sabiston. While working on a different project, Sabiston demonstrated his Rotoshop software to Linklater and “something clicked”.
The animation conveys a coffee shop style of art; shades of brown and red mixed with yellow and blue. Sabiston limited the color range available to the artists to keep the appearance of the film consistent. Each artist showcases a different art style throughout the film, but the colors stay within an earthy palette.
Sabiston’s Rotoshop software is notable because the program features important advantages over traditional rotoscope. The first upgrade is interpolation.
Interpolation is a difficult concept to understand until you watch an animator demonstrate the technique. In a featurette, Sabiston demonstrates interpolation; he traces a line in one frame that will show up off to the side in the following frame. Doing so allows him to approximate the exact line or shape again on the following frame for consistency. The result is consistent lines in important places – such as chins and necks – and the animation flows more smoothly.
Another advantage this software has over traditional rotoscoping is “layering”. Sometimes a specific house or nature scene is required across many frames. The animator colors over the house once and places it inside one layer within the program, and that same layer can be used across multiple frames.
The result, like interpolation, saves animators time so they don’t have to redraw the entire scene in each frame. Despite these upgrades, rotoscoping still requires a tremendous effort. According to Wired Magazine, each minute of Waking Life’s footage took up to 250 hours to animate.
The featurette also provides an eye-opening glimpse into some of the film’s mysterious non-animation effects. The crew achieved a scene in which the main character floats above a car by suspending actor Wiley Wiggins with cables attached to his body.
Traverse the light and shadows
“I didn’t start out with such a set idea about what it was going to be like. The film is so much about its own process. It unfolds, and you kind of accept it the way your own life unfolds. Things come at you, and you either incorporate them or you don’t”. -Linklater, AV Club
The film’s content is optimistic at times, neutral and questioning at other times, and occasionally the subject matter is dark and pessimistic. It’s a mirror of our thought cycles as we pass through our days.
The optimistic characters shine with luminescence; light pours through their eyes and they emit an aura. They speak with their hands, palms up, gesturing with openness and freedom. The animators absorbed Linklater’s vision and did a phenomenal job using their talents to breathe life into this film.
I enjoy the film’s ambiguous spirituality. At one point the main character questions where all this new information is coming from. Is it being transmitted to him from an outside force? Christian viewers might see the information as sourced from God and the other dream characters as angels and demons, or perhaps ghosts.
Alternately, a science fiction enthusiast might interpret this dream as alien abduction. Maybe he’s been abducted by aliens and they’re tinkering with his brain while he’s asleep, using tools to activate specific memories from his readings of D.H. Lawrence, Sartre, science class, and the bible.
Maybe when he floats up to the sky he’s about to wake up, or maybe he’s about to die. Maybe the aliens are bringing him out of the dream.
By working with a team of artists and animators to manifest his vision, Linklater created a film that is also a learning tool. The themes would be fascinating enough as a collection of quotes or classroom talking points, but Waking Life stretches beyond the man-made, elitist borders of the literary and academic worlds.
Like an actual dream, it bursts through the confines of academia to reach a universal audience. The vehicle is art, but the driving forces are curiosity and fear of the unknown. The film entertains, but it also delivers viewers into introspection.
According to a commonly accepted plot interpretation, the dreamer is either dead or he’s about to die. A cruel irony unfolds as dream characters deliver useful insights; it’s too late for the main character to apply this insight to his life. This is frustrating to watch, until you realize it’s not about him.
It’s about you, and you’re awake and alive.
Or… are you?
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ZeroSpace 