Jump to content

Waking Life

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 125.236.69.135 (talk) at 23:48, 28 January 2012 (→‎Soundtrack). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Waking Life
Theatrical release poster
Directed byRichard Linklater
Written byRichard Linklater
Produced byTommy Pallotta
Jonah Smith
Anne Walker-McBay
Palmer West
StarringWiley Wiggins
Kim Krizan
Lorelei Linklater
Trevor Jack Brooks
Timothy "Speed" Levitch
Alex Jones
CinematographyRichard Linklater
Tommy Pallotta
Edited bySandra Adair
Music byGlover Gill
Production
company
Distributed byFox Searchlight Pictures
Release dates
  • January 23, 2001 (2001-01-23) (Sundance)
  • October 19, 2001 (2001-10-19) (United States)
Running time
99 minutes
CountryTemplate:Film US
LanguageEnglish
Box office$3,176,880[1]

Waking Life is an American animated film (rotoscoped based on live action), directed by Richard Linklater and released 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.

The film focuses on the nature of dreams, consciousness, and existentialism.[2] The title is a reference to philosopher George Santayana's maxim: "Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."[3]

Plot

Waking Life is about an unnamed[2] young man in a persistent dream-like state that eventually progresses to lucidity. He initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions of issues such as reality, free will, the relationship of the subject with others, and the meaning of life. Along the way the film touches on other topics including existentialism, situationist politics, posthumanity, the film theory of André Bazin, and lucid dreaming itself. By the end, the protagonist feels trapped by his perpetual dream, broken up only by unending false awakenings. His final conversation with a dream character reveals that reality may be only a single instant which the individual consciousness interprets falsely as time (and, thus, life) until a level of understanding is achieved that may allow the individual to break free from the illusion.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their characters from Before Sunrise in one scene.[4][5]

Cast

The film features appearances from a wide range of actors and non-actors including:

As well as American philosophers and writers:

Production

Adding to the dream-like effect, the film used an animation technique based on rotoscoping.[6] Animators overlaid live action footage (shot by Linklater) with animation that roughly approximates the images actually filmed.[6][7] This technique is similar in some respects to the rotoscope style of 1970s filmmaker Ralph Bakshi. Rotoscoping itself, however, was not Bakshi's invention, but that of experimental silent film maker Max Fleischer, who patented the process in 1917.[8] A variety of artists were employed, so the feel of the movie continually changes, and gets stranger as time goes on. The result is a surreal, shifting dreamscape.

The animators used inexpensive "off-the-shelf" Apple Macintosh computers. The film was mostly produced using Rotoshop, a custom-made rotoscoping program that creates blends between keyframe vector shapes (the name is a play on popular bitmap graphics editing software Photoshop, which also makes use of virtual "layers"), and created specifically for the production by Bob Sabiston. Linklater would again use this animation method for his 2006 film A Scanner Darkly.

Release

Waking Life premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001, and was given a limited release in the United States on October 19, 2001.

Reception

Critical reaction to Waking Life has been mostly positive. It holds a rating of 80% across 137 reviews on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes — with critical consensus that "[t]he talky, animated Waking Life is a unique, cerebral experience" — and an average score of 82 out of 100 ("universal acclaim") on Metacritic, based on thirty-one reviews.[9][10] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four, describing it as "a cold shower of bracing, clarifying ideas."[11] Ebert later included the film on his ongoing list of "Great Movies."[12] Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly awarded the film an "A" rating, calling it "a work of cinematic art in which form and structure pursues the logic-defying (parallel) subjects of dreaming and moviegoing,"[13] while Stephen Holden of The New York Times said it was "so verbally dexterous and visually innovative that you can't absorb it unless you have all your wits about you."[14] Dave Kehr of The New York Times found the film to be "lovely, fluid, funny" and stated that it "never feels heavy or over-ambitious."[2]

Conversely, J. Hoberman of The Village Voice felt that Waking Life "doesn't leave you in a dream ... so much as it traps you in an endless bull session."[15] Frank Lovece felt the film was "beautifully drawn" but called its content "pedantic navel-gazing."[16]

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.

The American Film Institute nominated Waking Life for its Top 10 Animated Films list.[17]

Home media

The film was released on DVD in North America in May 2002. Special features included several commentaries, documentaries, interviews, trailers and deleted scenes, as well as the short film Snack and Drink. A bare-bones DVD with no special features was released in Region 2 in February 2003.

Soundtrack

File:Waking Life Soundtrack.JPG
Soundtrack cover

The Waking Life OST was performed and written by Glover Gill and the Tosca Tango Orchestra, except for Frédéric Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9, No. 2. The soundtrack was relatively successful. Featuring the nuevo tango style, it bills itself "the 21st Century Tango." The tango contributions were influenced by the music of the Argentine "father of new tango" Ástor Piazzolla.

The trance act called 1200 Micrograms samples lines from the movie Waking Life in their song:"Acid for Nothing"; a trance remix of Dire Straits' Money for Nothing.

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ "Waking Life (2001) - Box Office Mojo". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2010-03-20.
  2. ^ a b c Kehr, Dave (October 14, 2001). "FILM; Waking Up While Still Dreaming". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved July 6, 2010.
  3. ^ Santayana, George (1989). Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Cambridge: MIT Press. p. 156. ISBN 0262192861. OCLC 20015349.
  4. ^ 8:40 p.m. ET (2004-07-05). "Hawke and Delpy reunite 'Before Sunset' - More news and other features- msnbc.com". MSNBC. Retrieved 26 May 2009.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  5. ^ DigitallyObsessed. "dOc Scenes Interview: Dream Life: An Interview With Julie Delpy". Digitallyobsessed.com. Retrieved 26 May 2009.
  6. ^ a b Silverman, Jason (19 October 2001). "Animating a Waking Life". Wired. Retrieved 30 September 2009.
  7. ^ Howe, Desson (26 October 2001). "Aroused by Waking Life". The Washington Post. The Washington Post Company. Retrieved 26 May 2009.
  8. ^ US patent 1242674, Max Fleischer, "Method of producing moving-picture cartoons", issued 1917-10-09 
  9. ^ "Waking Life Movie Reviews, Pictures". Rotten Tomatoes. IGN Entertainment. Retrieved 26 May 2009.
  10. ^ "Waking Life (2001): Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 26 May 2009.
  11. ^ Ebert, Roger (19 October 2001). "Waking Life". Chicago Sun-Times. Sun-Times Media Group. Retrieved 26 May 2009.
  12. ^ Ebert, Roger (11 February 2009). "Waking Life". Chicago Sun-Times. Sun-Times Media Group. Retrieved 26 May 2009.
  13. ^ Schwarzbaum, Lisa (18 October 2001). "Waking Life". Entertainment Weekly. Time Inc. Retrieved 26 May 2009.
  14. ^ Holden, Stephen (October 12, 2001). "Surreal Adventures Somewhere Near the Land of Nod". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 26 May 2009. [dead link]
  15. ^ Hoberman, J. (16 October 2001). "New York Movies - Sleep With Me". The Village Voice. Village Voice Media. Retrieved 26 May 2009.
  16. ^ Lovece, Frank. "Waking Life Review". TVGuide.com. Retrieved 26 May 2009.
  17. ^ AFI's 10 Top 10 Ballot

References

  • Jones, Kent (2007). Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. pp. 76–78. ISBN 0819568449.
  • Rosenbaum, Jonathan (2004). "Good Vibrations". Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801878403.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Waking Life.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Waking_Life&oldid=473769597"