I won second place at the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association (TIPA) for a critical review of the film Waking Life.
By J.E. Warren
Associate Editor
When Bob Sabiston, half of the two-person Flat Black Films crew, assembled a team of more than 30 artists, many of whom he'd worked with previously, his work standards were clear: Good artists, good people.
Good artists because Sabiston and film partner Tommy Pallotta were setting out to work with writer and director Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused) on a kind of cinematic art never before conceived of. Good people because Linklater had an idea that had been germinating in his mind for ten years, and he needed more than talent to see it to its fruition. He needed soul and talent.
The film presents us with Wiley Wiggins (Dazed and Confused), who portrays a character floating between experiences and conversations. He could be dreaming or awake; dead or alive. The audience accompanies him on his journey as he speaks with and observes various others sharing their opinions about life and existence, and as he gradually comes to an understanding of his own condition.
The cast of characters include Ethan Hawke, Adam Goldberg, Julie Delpy, Nicky Katt and others. Several of the filmmakers' family members, friends and even teachers also played roles, such as the real-life existentialism professor who visits with Wiley's character.
Waking Life is a major work on several levels. Most technically, in the sense of its look and feel. A new kind of software invented by Sabiston allows for the rotoscoping technique that has made it the first independent computer-animated American feature film. It's expressionist art for the twenty-first century.
The software enabled the team of artists to trace, with lines and colors, over the live-action footage, which was filmed over the summer of 1999. This makes Waking Life both a live-action feature and an animated feature. It's beautifully achieved on both levels.
Sabiston's rotoscoping is a take on the technique invented in 1915 by animator Max Fleisher, whereby live-action film was projected onto an animation table where the images were traced. The original technique had its feature debut in 1937 with Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was all too apparent how life-like Snow White became when rotoscoped, but clearly, Linklater and Flat Black Films are pushing the envelope.
Rotoscoping hasn't taken much physical work off anyone's backs, however. On the film's Web site (wakinglife.com), it's estimated that one minute of animation equals the product of 250 hours of work. The rotoscoping took nine months to complete; the filmmakers were just in time for the Sundance Film Festival.
Waking Life is a major work, not only in the technical sense, but in its intellectual depth as well. It serves as an illustrated cast of mouthpieces for a myriad of new and old philosophies, culminating in a message that screams to its audience that it's time to end a culture that's grown up around us and swallowed us, whereby people are sleepwalking while they're awake and wakewalking while they're asleep.
The film pulls from many of time's great thinkers: Jean-Paul Sartre, Plato, Nietzche, Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence and several others, in order to form an entertaining and up-to-date work of perspective and thought for the movie-going crowds of our time.
