Waking Life (2001)

• Year: 2001
• Released: 07 Mar 2002
• Country: United States
• Adwords: 5 wins & 21 nominations
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243017/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/waking_life
• Metacritics: https://www.metacritic.com/movie/waking-life
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: English
• MPA Rating: R
• Genre: Animation, Drama, Fantasy
• Runtime: 99 min
• Writer: Richard Linklater
• Director: Richard Linklater
• Cast: Ethan Hawke, Trevor Jack Brooks, Lorelei Linklater
• Keywords: dream, philosophy, parallel world, freedom, existentialism,

	7.7/10
	83/100
	80% – Critics
	87% – Audience

Waking Life Storyline

Dreams. What are they? An escape from reality or reality itself? Waking Life follows the dream(s) of one man and his attempt to find and discern the absolute difference between waking life and the dreamworld. While trying to figure out a way to wake up, he runs into many people on his way; some of which offer one sentence asides on life, others delving deeply into existential questions and life’s mysteries. We become the main character. It becomes our dream and our questions being asked and answered. Can we control our dreams? What are they telling us about life? About death? About ourselves and where we come from and where we are going? The film does not answer all these for us. Instead, it inspires us to ask the questions and find the answers ourselves.

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Waking Life Movie Reviews

very good, creative, expansion of Slackers

It is rare for a director to return to a film and improve it but Linklater does it here. Taking the general form of Slackers, he adds a metaphysical story line and coats it with extraordinary eye candy.

The rotoscoping really provides an acid trip experience of constantly shifting planes with backgrounds going one way and characters going the other.

The string quartet tango score also is an excellent use of music to reinforce the exotic aspects of the production.

The monologues are thought provoking and compelling. The story line examining dream/death connection is novel. Score points for originality of story, art direction and narrative line. Some quite funny parts (e.g. boat car, bar shoot out, etc.), some creepy parts (e.g. jailbird rant, second boat man meeting, etc.).

I have seen this several times and enjoyed it every time. Farily rare is the movie that can really stand up to multiple viewings. This is one.

Very refreshing. See it.

dream-like experiment

A young man (Wiley Wiggins) talks to people he encounters about existential meaning. There are also various other people talking about various things. It’s a lot of metaphysical gobity gook. The style of the animation is fascinating and I stayed with Wiggins for the first 20 minutes. It’s weird and a cool experimental animation. I could care less about what these people say. It’s meaningless and might as well be white noise.

Then there is a section with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in bed. They’re having a different version of their conversation in ‘Before Sunrise’. It’s compelling cinema for someone like me who loves that movie. After that, the movie has more gobity gook and it loses me completely. This could be a great style to do with interviews with compelling real world figures. I can imagine this with Dalai Lama or a President. This becomes unwatchable but I’m intrigued by Linklater’s dream-like experiment. I only wish his experiment didn’t put me to sleep.

Original, But Overrated, Pretentious and Extremely Boring

I was very curious to watch “Waking Life” and I expected a great movie. I was wrong! There are positive aspects, practically the originality and the adopted technique in the animation. Unfortunately, the shallow plot is simply awful, based on philosophy of readers of cartoons and pseudo-intellectuals. The wavy animations and the tedious story make the eyes very tired, and I slept many times along this 101 minutes running time, a nightmare with dreams. I do not recall how many times I had to press the rewind button to see the scene again. By the quantity of persons related in the cast, I believe that director and writer Richard Linklater is very well connected with people of the cinema industry that probably helped him promoting this overrated, pretentious and extremely boring film. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): “Waking Life”