Review of Richard Linklater's animated film Waking Life

Movie Review

Richard Linklater's new experimental feature "Waking Life" is being anticipated in the chatrooms as the next Great Savior of contemporary American film, and while it is thought-provoking, witty, and utterly unique when compared to the crop of most films of the past year (with the exception of the brilliant "Driven", just kidding...), there's something about it that smacked, at least to me, of warmed-over Ralph Bakshi.

A patented Robert L digression: In the early 1970s, New Jersey-bred Bakshi fled the assembly line of Saturday morning TV to front a crusade that would elevate the animation medium above the level of mere "kiddie flick" and reinvent it as a tool for socio-political commentary and "adult" storytelling. His adaptation of Robert Crumb's "Fritz The Cat" was a huge success, and gave him the leverage to find studio financing for a trilogy of controversial followups: "Heavy Traffic", "Coonskin", and "Hey Good Lookin'". These gritty and bleak satires combined traditional animation, live action, and "rotoscoping" (tracing over filmed footage for added realism) to forever puncture the established definition of the term "cartoon". Boldly depicting the very-real issues of poverty, drug abuse, sexual perversion, racial intolerance, and other hot buttons that would have Walt Disney spinning on his Popsicle stick, the films found increasingly indifferent audiences and thus, limited releases. Eventually, Bakshi courted the mainstream with a series of even bigger failures, including an attempt at Tolkein's "Lord Of The Rings", the history of rock music with "American Pop", and reaching critical mass with the Frazetta-designed fantasy "Fire And Ice", before returning to television.

Richard Linklater helped launch the "indie" film movement of the early 1990s with his homemade account of Austin eccentrics "Slacker", coining a catchphrase and chronicling a generation in a moment of perfect timing that hadn't been captured since Michael Wadleigh's "Woodstock". Over the next decade, Linklater continued to produce wildly disparate and personal films ("Dazed And Confused", "Before Sunrise", "Suburbia"), and toyed with the Hollywood system with the decidedly "mixed" result "The Newton Boys". With his TIFF 2001 presentation of Monte Hellman's "Two Lane Blacktop", Linklater has revealed himself to be a passionate devotee of obscure-but-influential 70s auteurs and I'm convinced that Bakshi's experiments planted the seed of his latest endeavor.

Picture from Richard Linklater's animated movie Waking Life

Scene from the animated film Waking Life

Like "Slacker", "Waking Life" is basically plotless, following around a single character, in this case a college student ("Dazed And Confused"s Wiley Wiggins), through a surreal dreamscape as he contemplates many a Big Issue, all the time wondering whether he's awake or not. He discusses such weighty topics as quantum physics, the origin of language, the fallacy of "free will", and even film as a narrative medium in coffee shops, on street corners, and in the offices of various academics and eccentrics. There are cameos from Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, reprising their roles from Linklater's "Before Sunrise", and director Steven Soderbergh, who offers an anecdote on Billy Wilder.

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As stimulating as the conversations are, the main reason to experience "Waking Life" is for its colourful, posterized visuals, courtesy of a team of animators who "rotoscoped" Linklater's original digital video footage. Against bright-hued, sometimes Impressionistic backgrounds, the foreground characters emote and gesticulate as if made of liquid acrylic, occasionally metamorphosing to punctuate the subject of the conversation or to embody an emotional state. Some of the effects are quite subtle, such as electric arcs moving through a character's arm to illustrate the workings of the human brain, others are more on-the-nose, such as a humanities professor in the person of a chimp.

Why animation, if only to serve an array of chatty eggheads? Well...why not? Animation has a way of transporting us into a world in which we can confront issues that might seem utterly banal if presented through conventional live-action means, think of any "Simpsons" or "King Of The Hill" installment. Only the staunchest of indie-acolytes would line up to hear an overcaffeinated filmgeek ramble on about the writings of Cahier Du Cinema Cofounder/French critic Andre Bazin (if I were to animate any of my film school lectures, I'd use a style more suggestive of Francis Bacon), but, if presented in a way that looks "cool", others might be willing to give the subject some pause.

If nothing else, Richard Linklater has secured himself a spot on the midnight movie circuit for the "chemically inclined" desperate to retire the print of "The Song Remains The Same".

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