Waking Life turns 25 this week, and its handmade, shape-shifting look still stands apart. Richard Linklater’s 2001 film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001 and reached United States cinemas on October 19, 2001. The question worth revisiting is how he made a dream feel so tactile and strange.
Its dream look was made on standard Macs
The animators used standard Apple Macintosh computers. The film was mostly produced using Rotoshop, a rotoscoping program designed specifically for the production by Bob Sabiston. Rotoshop creates blends between key frame vector shapes and also uses virtual layers.
Linklater held the idea for 20 years
In a 2001 interview, Linklater estimated the idea for the film came “before I was even interested in film, probably 20 years ago.” For a while he felt the idea “didn’t quite work”, calling it “too blunt, too realistic”.
A realistic film about an unreality
Linklater said, “I think to make a realistic film about an unreality the film had to be a realistic unreality.” That led to the film’s rotoscoping technique, in which animators overlay the live-action footage with animation that roughly approximates the images actually filmed.
Six weeks of live action on Mini DV
The live-action footage was shot by Linklater and Palotta in Mini DV camera with real actors over six weeks, starting in August 1999. According to Wiggins, there was a loose script that greatly changed during shooting.
Before Sunrise stars pop up
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their characters from Before Sunrise (1995) in one scene. The live-action shoot in Mini DV used real actors, and its original scenes later featured as extra editions in DVD.
Rotoshop painted between key frames
Rotoshop creates blends between key frame vector shapes and also uses virtual layers. Bob Sabiston designed it specifically for the production of Waking Life. Linklater used this animation method again in his 2006 film A Scanner Darkly.
The style shifts artist by artist
Linklater employed a variety of artists, so the movie’s feel continually changes. This produces a surreal, shifting dreamscape. The critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes says this inventive animated aesthetic adds a distinctive visual component to a film that could easily have rested on its smart screenplay and talented ensemble cast.
Sundance to universal acclaim
Waking Life premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001 and was given a limited release in the United States on October 19, 2001. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 81% based on 145 reviews, with an average rating of 7.40/10. Metacritic assigned the film a score of 85 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating “universal acclaim”. It also won the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Experimental Film, the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Animated Film, and the Venice Film Festival CinemAvvenire award for Best Film.
Ebert called it a cold shower
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four, calling it “a cold shower of bracing, clarifying ideas”. Ebert later included Waking Life on his list of “Great Movies”. Metacritic assigned the film a score of 85 out of 100, based on 32 critics.
What is your favourite fact about Waking Life’s making?
Facts from Wikipedia: Waking Life, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Film images from TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.