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 | Wiley Wiggins |
| Music by | Glover Gill |
| Cinematography | Richard Linklater Tommy Pallotta |
| Edited by | Sandra Adair |
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Production
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| Distributed by | Fox Searchlight Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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101 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $3.2 million |
Waking Life is a 2001 American adult animated docufiction/drama film, directed by Richard Linklater. Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, it is the first (and currently only) animated film released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. The film explores a wide range of philosophical issues including the nature of reality, dreams, consciousness, the meaning of life, free will, and existentialism.Waking Life is centered on a young man who wanders through a succession of dream-like realities wherein he encounters a series of individuals who willingly engage in insightful philosophical discussions.
The film was entirely rotoscoped, although it was shot using digital video of live actors with a team of artists drawing stylized lines and colors over each frame with computers, rather than being filmed and traced onto cells on a light box. The film contains several parallels to Linklater's 1991 film Slacker. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their characters from Before Sunrise in one scene.Waking Life premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival.
Waking Life is about an unnamed young man living an ethereal existence that lacks transitions between everyday events and that eventually progresses toward an existential crisis. For most of the film he observes quietly but later participates actively in philosophical discussions involving other characters—ranging from quirky scholars and artists to everyday restaurant-goers and friends—about such issues as metaphysics, free will, social philosophy, and the meaning of life. Other scenes do not even include the protagonist's presence, but rather, focus on a random isolated person, group of people, or couple engaging in such topics from a disembodied perspective. Along the way, the film touches also upon existentialism, situationist politics, posthumanity, the film theory of André Bazin, and lucid dreaming, and makes references to various celebrated intellectual and literary figures by name.
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