"In a way, I felt this was a kamikaze run at cinema," says writer/director Richard Linklater, whose first animated movie, the nearly uncategorizable Waking Life, opens this month. "It was the same mind-set I was in when I did Slacker: Like, 'This is it. We live or die on this one. Everything is going in this movie -- every idea, every thought. And it all has to work.'"
Astoundingly, it does. The plot: Wiley Wiggins (who was just 16 when he starred in Linklater's second feature, 1993's Dazed and Confused) wanders around Austin, Texas, chatting with strangers about things like Zen Buddhism, quantum physics, evolution, alienation, and whether the most universal human characteristic is fear or laziness. Gradually, he comes to realize he's stuck in a dream that he can't wake up from. "In live action, a movie with this much dense information might be hideously boring and unwatchable," says the 41-year-old Linklater. "But the animation makes an interesting anchor." Linklater shot the entire film on digital video in just 25 days. Then he turned the footage over to animation director Bob Sabiston, who (with a team of 31 animators, including Wiggins) digitally painted over every frame using his own "interpolated rotoscoping" software. The end result is a lo-fi, almost sloppy style that makes everything in Waking Life seem to pulse and float.
But the movie's palpable emotion is equally the result of Sabiston's ability to infuse every face with incredibly subtle details; the tiniest shifts in a character's thought and feeling come through instantly, without ever seeming obvious. Linklater says he never would have made Waking Life without Sabiston: "The vague idea had been swimming around in my brain for a long time," he says. "But I couldn't visualize it in any was that seemed like a movie. Then I saw what Bob was working on [a 1998 short called Roadhead], and I was like, 'Wow. This is the way it should look' -- because Sabiston's style is real, it's human, and yet it's otherworldly."
As for the superloose plot, Wiggins thinks Waking Life "really ties a lot of stuff together" in terms of Linklater's favorite themes. "If you go back and watch the first scene in [1991's] Slacker," says Wiggins, "Rick has this monologue about dreams being like glimpses into alternate realities that are created every time you're faced with a decision. Like, how maybe if he had stayed at the bus station instead of taking a cab, he would have had this whole different reality: playing pinball, meeting a nice girl -- basically, all the things that I do in this movie. I think of Waking Life as, like, the Richard Linklater Universe."
And for all its ostensible indulgences -- rambling dialogue about the existence of God and the meaning of life -- Waking Life is Linklater's most sophisticated and artful articulation of these ideas. One of the film's most affecting moments is a simple, tight shot of Wiggins' face as he sits in a movie theater watching a scene in which two men define a "holy moment" -- which is no more complicated than it sounds, and which brings Wiggins to tears. "I think all of the characters in Waking Life are manifestations of Rick," says Ethan Hawke, who appears in the movie with Julie Delpy (the two played star-crossed lovers in Linklater's unapologetically romantic Before Sunrise) as a couple who talk about aging, death, and the collective unconscious as they lie in bed. "It really felt," says Hawke, "like we were portraying this dream of Rick's."
"My goal has always been to capture the way the human mind works -- that accumulation-of-ideas sort of structure," Linklater says. "That's what the narrative of all our lives is. If you're 17 years old and already feel a certain existential isolation inherently, once you start reading the people who have articulated is clearest, it really gets you. It doesn't help you, really, it just digs into you deeper and sends you on this endless search. And that's what this movie is." Rob Nelson