Wiggins plays a man wandering around Austin, Texas, who is uncertain whether he’s awake or asleep. He may be stuck in a dream, unable to wake up – or reality might just be this weird. Films often try too hard to capture what dreams feel like, with violent, surrealist imagery, or wacky, quasi-Lychian abstractions.
In Waking Life, however, Linklater propels our hero through what feels unnervingly like a dream with none of that ham-handed crudeness. We, along with Wiggins’ dreamer, are attempting to stay on track, only to suddenly find ourselves walking down a street talking to a stranger, with no word on why, or how, we got there. That’s what Waking Life is, essentially – a collection of strange, dreamlike moments.
We’re riding along with our hero as he meets a kaleidoscopic array of artists, philosophers and eccentrics, who wax lyrical about everything – from dreams, to politics, to the nature of reality itself. The whole thing was very loose during filming, which was done with little consumer DV handy cams”. Linklater has always told stories about people tussling with big, abstract ideas, whether it’s the walk-and-talk ruminations of Jesse and Céline in the Before trilogy, or the stoner philosophy of Dazed and Confused.
His protagonists have the kinds of contemplative conversations we think we’re having when we’re talking the ear off a stranger at a party. But Waking Life is not mere dorm room sophistry: it will likely introduce you to some genuinely mind-blowing ideas as you’re carried downstream through its visually sumptuous waters. The entire film is rotoscoped, a technique invented by Max Fleischer back in 1915, where artists hand-draw over each frame of the film, leading to a hyper-real animated style.
Each sequence is drawn by a different animator, changing as the film’s tone does. For others, it made them gently paranoid about whether they were, in fact, awake at all. He considers this for a moment.
A great deal has happened since 2001, when Waking Life came out. In the wake of 9/11, Roger Ebert said that the film “could not come at a better time”, praising it for “[celebrating] a series of articulate, intelligent characters who seek out the meaning of their existence and do not have the answers”. Waking Life is available to stream on Disney+ in Australia and Prime Video in the US.
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