Waking Life

WAKING LIFE is set in Linklater's hometown of Austin and consists of around 70 episodes in which we meet a colourful mix of characters. Most of them tell us something about their view of life and the world. The protagonist of the film is a young man in his early 20s, played by Wiley Wiggins from DAZED AND CONFUSED. Wiggings drifts from one encounter to the next and is a passive listener to a multitude of monologues, phrases, musings, lectures and conversations. Only rarely does he enter into a real dialogue with anyone. (Gavin Smith)

The transition from one aggregate state to another and from one form of existence to another works quite naturally in this film. WAKING LIFE is an animated film that takes its narrative about the merging of dream and reality further at the level of its realisation: it glides through watercolour landscapes and over delicately sketched faces, enters worlds of thought, whose spawn dance cheekily around heads, makes the waking state and dream experience indistinguishable not only for its hero - and thus also allows the cascades of words to fade out a little.

WAKING LIFE is above all a unique visual experience. And promotes a new animation software that goes against the technical and aesthetic standards of established major producers and turns its back on photorealistic demands and hi-tech equipment costing millions. The technique of rotoscoping, in which animations are created on the basis of real film templates, is not a new process - it was used as early as 1915 by the legendary Max Fleischer and was used, for example, in Walt Disney's SCHNEEWITTEN. Bob Sabiston and Tommy Pallotta have now made the process suitable for the home computer. (Isabella Reicher/VIENNALE catalogue 2001)