Waking Life
| Waking Life | |
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 Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Richard Linklater |
| Produced by | Tommy Pallotta Jonah Smith Anne Walker-McBay Palmer West |
| Written by | Richard Linklater |
| Starring | Trevor Jack Brooks Lorelei Linklater Wiley Wiggins Timothy "Speed" Levitch Alex Jones |
| Music by | Glover Gill |
| Cinematography | Richard Linklater Tommy Pallotta |
| Editing by | Sandra Adair |
| Distributed by | Fox Searchlight Pictures |
| Release date(s) | January 23, 2001 |
| Running time | 99 min. |
| Language | English |
Waking Life is a digitally enhanced live action rotoscoped film, directed by Richard Linklater and made in 2001. The entire film was shot using digital video and then a team of artists using computers drew stylized lines and colors over each frame. This technique is similar in some respects to the rotoscope style of 1970s filmmaker Ralph Bakshi, which was invented in the 1920s.
The title is a reference to George Santayana's maxim that "[s]anity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."[1]
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Plot
Waking Life is about a young man in a persistent lucid dream-like state. The film follows its protagonist as he initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions that weave together issues like reality, free will, our relationships with others, and the meaning of life. Along the way the film touches on other topics including existentialism, situationist politics, posthumanity, and the film theory of André Bazin.
Production
Adding to the dream-like effect, the film used an innovative animation technique based on rotoscoping. Animators overlaid live action footage (shot by Linklater) with animation that roughly approximates the images actually filmed. A variety of artists were employed, so the feel of the movie continually changes. The result is a surreal, shifting dreamscape.
The animators used inexpensive "off-the-shelf" Apple Macintosh computers (as opposed to the expensive supercomputers and computer clusters used by Pixar and DreamWorks). The film was mostly produced using Rotoshop, a custom-made rotoscoping program that creates blends between keyframe vector shapes, and created specifically for the production by Bob Sabiston (the name is a play on the popular bitmap graphics editing software called Photoshop, which also makes use of virtual "layers").
Awards
Nominated for numerous awards, mainly for its technical achievements, Waking Life won the National Society of Film Critics award for "Best Experimental Film," the New York Film Critics Circle award for "Best Animated Film," and the "CinemAvvenire" award at the Venice Film Festival for "Best Film." It was also nominated for the Golden Lion, the festival's main award.
Soundtrack
The soundtrack was performed and written by Glover Gill and the Tosca Tango Orchestra, except for one piece written by Frédéric Chopin, and was relatively successful. Featuring the nuevo tango style, it bills itself "the 21st Century Tango." Influence for the compositions stem from the Argentine "father of new tango" Ástor Piazzolla. The actual tango scores are revised renditions of Ástor Piazzolla's works.
DVD
The film was released on DVD in North America on May 7, 2002. Special features included several commentaries, documentaries, interviews and deleted scenes, as well as the short film Snack and Drink. A bare-bones DVD with no special features was released on Region 2 on February 24, 2003.
See also
- David Sosa
- Dream argument
- Dream art
- Eamonn Healy
- Existentialism
- Lucid dreaming
- Oneironaut
- Simulated reality
- Robert Solomon
- Wiley Wiggins
- Speed Levitch
References
- ^ Santayana, George (1989). Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 156.
External links
- Waking Life at the Internet Movie Database
- Waking Life at Rotten Tomatoes
- Anatomy of a Scene: Waking Life, from the Sundance Channel website
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