Review of Waking Life

Waking Life is a film directed by Richard Linklater. It’s a animation about dreams and the unconscious  The whole film was rotoscoped. They first recorded live actors and then had different artists rotoscope the frames, using the computer. You could tell that there were different styles in the rotoscopes. Some of the scenes looked like they were just bitmapped. I did not like the fact that they used different artists because the styles were different and therefore the rotoscopes were colored differently and gave the film a shaky feeling. It made me nauseous.

However, I did like how Waking Life had silly little comical animations to connect with the audience more. For example when the girl was talking about love and mini animations came up on the side (they were like visuals of the words she was saying). Then there was one where a guy was talking about how humans are mostly composed of water, and a masked animation of water was building up in him. Then he said something about a gear and his head turned to a gear, and he said world view and the earth comes up. There were a lot of these mini animations on that side that are really interesting, because when people watch interviews, they tend to get bored and the mini animations are a great way to keep the viewers interested. Also some people are better with visuals and having those mini animations would allow the viewer to understand better. The mini animations also help with the plot, which is about dreams and in dreams anything can happen a man’s head can turn into a gear or atoms.

I also loved the transitions from one scene to the next in Waking Life. For example there was one scene where the main character was in a bar and the “camera” panned from table to table in the bar listening in on the conversations that went on, then it went to two men that had guns and when they pulled the trigger, the film transitioned to another scene, like a dream. In dreams noise like gun shots would trigger transitions to a different dream. The use of the monkey projecting the scenes was pretty cool too. Another thing I realized is that things are always floating in the film, which is another representation of dreams.

This was an interesting film, but the shaky feeling really detached me from the film and was a real turn-off. I almost couldn't go through with the film, it made me super dizzy.