Waking Life

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: No
Watched With: Amberly, Jordan, Tyler

Richard Linklater's highly experimental musings on dreams realised with an awesomely trippy rotoscoped animation technique that was later refined for when he made A Scanner Darkly. I saw the twice at the cinema on it's release and remember walking out into the street after and everything was still slowly undulating about like the animation.

It's a series of interviews and conversations or speeches on a lot of big ideas, especially at the beginning. The beauty of it is you don't have to grasp exactly what these people are talking about, you can let it wash over you or just enjoy the animation. Eventually something resembling a narrative thread begins to manifest that links these ideas together. For some people, that's not needed, they are happy just to watch intellectual conversations, but for me I cling to that narrative, however much I'm self-constructing it. And it works either way. This is a film made for multiple interpretations.

I know the animation style puts a lot of people off, but I really like it. I also LOVE the soundtrack done by Glover Gill and the Tosca Tango Orchestra. This was also exciting for me when it came out in 2001 because it was probably the first film I saw in a cinema that I knew was cut and edited on a computer with software exactly the same specs as my own at the time. Makes the dream seem that much more reachable.

It's a hard film to categorise and certainly not for everyone but if you are in the mood for some existential thinking then I highly recommend you give it a try. It's extremely rewarding for some. And as a bonus you get a conversation between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy which I like to believe is just a deleted scene from Before Sunrise. I hear Linklater is contemplating a third in that series and I hope they make it so.