By Richard Linklater, 2001.
Starring Wiley Wiggins and thousands of other people.
Rating: 8/10, 9/10.
In 2001, the Academy Awards instituted a new Oscar Award: Best Animated Feature Film. The nominees? Shrek, Monster’s Inc., and Jimmy Neutron. Let’s ignore Waking Life for a moment. Already, that’s a crappy nominee list. I didn’t see any of them, but that’s beside the point. I’m sure they’re all great pictures, but come on. First, why only three nominees when nearly all the other awards have five? Second, why only computer animated films? Is the Academy trying to tell us that the era of hand-drawn animation has ended? They best not be.
We all know that they just added that award because they wanted to give Shrek something, and they were afraid to nominate an animated comedy for best picture. Fine. I’ll even accept that. Even so, how hard would it have been to nominate two more movies? My suggestions: Final Fantasy, for being a tremendous visual achievement and not actually being entirely sucky otherwise, and Waking Life, for being the best damned thing ever, and almost horrendously innovative, to boot.
By now the rotoscoping technique (filming live-action on digital, transferring it to a computer where the frames are hand-drawn-with-computer-overed, etc.) has been discussed to death. Fortunately, it’s something that can be discussed to death and still be frickin’ amazing. The result of the technique is an animation style like no other, one that plays funny tricks on the brain...you’re watching the movie, and then you forget you’re watching animation until you glance away from the screen or something blatantly impossible happens on it. If you glance away, the appearance of reality seems surreal for a moment until you realize that your brain has it backwards. If you wait for something impossible to happen, at first you think "great special effects," but then you realize (a lot of realizations going on here) that no, the animators just continued lines in their own way.
This flippity floppy that your brain engages in while watching Waking Life is a great setting for the "action" of the film. Both distracting and engrossing, disjointed and hypnotic, now dreamlike, now not, it puts one in the state of mind in which what might otherwise be dismissed as amateur night at the philosophy club can be taken seriously. Not to say that the dialogues and monologues (because that’s all there is, really, no real action of any kind) are ridiculous or shouldn’t be taken seriously; it’s just that, in a live action film, it would have been very easy to disregard them. Thank god we don’t.
I don’t really have much to say about the talky side of the film besides the fact that it’s very, very good. I can’t expound on it in any way, since all that philosophy business tends to make its transactions several miles about my head, and I can’t tell you if it’s technically good or whatever you’d call it, but damn, I was enthralled. Still am.