‘Waking Life’: Richard Linklater’s animated film within a dream
Posted On
(Credit: Searchlight Pictures)
Being stuck in a dream is a hard feeling to translate on screen, with filmmakers such as David Lynch and Charlie Kaufman creating films that mimic the distorted reality and distinct surrealism of your mind being awake while your body isn’t. This effect is sometimes achieved through the exaggeration of strange details and mind-bending concepts that push us outside of our realm of familiarity, challenging us with warped information that vaguely resembles our waking experiences while being completely different. While films like Mulholland Drive and Being John Malkovich embody these qualities, Richard Linklater also tried his hand at the trippy genre with his 2001 film Waking Life, which is one of the few films that is entirely set within a dream.
There’s an existentialist thread that runs through all of Linklater’s films, whether it be the meandering conversations in Before Sunrise or the melancholic nostalgia of Dazed and Confused as people unknowingly say goodbye to their youth, the director has always been interested in philosophical subject matter and the bigger questions in life, asking questions as a way of reaching clarity.
However, Waking Life remains as his most explicitly philosophical film, despite being less well known compared to the Before Trilogy and Boyhood. It follows a young man called Wiley Wiggins, who finds himself in a permanent lucid dream state, moving between different dreams and speaking with people around him to try and find answers to questions about reality, free will, relationships and the meaning of life itself.
The film completely redefined what people thought was possible in independent filmmaking. Linklater chose to shoot the entire film on cheap DV cameras and then animate this footage in post-production. Over 30 artists used a new software program on the Mac G4 computer to essentially paint over the footage and create a unique new animation style. Because of this, it has an ambiguous and dream-like quality of looking both real and not real, with a twitchy and fluttering visual style that keeps shifting before your very eyes.
We follow Wiggins and various other characters through their dream worlds as they have philosophical discussions and attempt to find meaning in their confusion over the big questions in life. It’s a thought-provoking and trippy film that explores the highs and lows of human consciousness and, ultimately, how being alive is defined by asking these questions. Linklater poses that we are not truly alive unless we ponder the nature of being alive in the first place, and our existence is defined by self-reflection and rumination.
Like Linklater’s other work, the film is incredibly dialogue-heavy, but because of the animation style and ever-changing landscape of the characters, it doesn’t feel dense and instead feels light and airy as Wiggins drifts around in his lucid-like state.
While Waking Life is one of Linklater’s lesser-known films, it is an incredible testament to the innovation of low-budget filmmaking and how the medium’s framework can be moulded in new ways to suit the tone of the story. The relaxed structure creates a dreamy and otherworldly state that makes you feel as if you’re not part of this world and briefly living in another reality entirely.
[embedded content]
Related Topics
