Waking Life

The entire film was shot using digital video and then a team of artists using computers drew stylized lines and colors over each frame. The film was Fox Searchlight Pictures' only production using this technique.
The title is a reference to George Santayana's maxim: "Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."

Plot
Waking Life is about a young man in a persistent lucid dream-like state.

He initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions of issues such as reality, free will, the relationship of the subject with others, and the meaning of life. Along the way the film touches on other topics including existentialism, situationist politics, posthumanity, the film theory of André Bazin, and lucid dreaming itself.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their characters from Before Sunrise in one scene.
Cast
Wiley Wiggins plays the protagonist.
The film features appearances from a wide range of actors and non-actors including:
Eamonn Healy
Speed Levitch
Adam Goldberg
Nicky Katt
Alex Jones
Steven Soderbergh
Steven Prince
As well as American philosophers and writers:
Louis H.

Waking Life Trailer

Free Will And Physics - Waking Life Excerpt

Solomon
Kim Krizan
Production
Adding to the dream-like effect, the film used an animation technique based on rotoscoping. Animators overlaid live action footage (shot by Linklater) with animation that roughly approximates the images actually filmed. This technique is similar in some respects to the rotoscope style of 1970s filmmaker Ralph Bakshi. Rotoscoping itself, however, was not Bakshi's invention, but that of experimental silent film maker Max Fleischer, who patented the process in 1917. A variety of artists were employed, so the feel of the movie continually changes, and gets stranger as time goes on.

The result is a surreal, shifting dreamscape.
The animators used inexpensive "off-the-shelf" Apple Macintosh computers. The film was mostly produced using Rotoshop, a custom-made rotoscoping program that creates blends between keyframe vector shapes (the name is a play on popular bitmap graphics editing software Photoshop, which also makes use of virtual "layers"), and created specifically for the production by Bob Sabiston.

Waking Life - Ants

Waking Life - Fear Or Laziness?

Linklater would again use this animation method for his 2006 film A Scanner Darkly (which was distributed by Warner Independent Pictures).
Release
Waking Life had its theatrical release in January 2001. Special features included several commentaries, documentaries, interviews and deleted scenes, as well as the short film Snack and Drink.

A bare-bones DVD with no special features was released in Region 2 in February 2003.
Reception
Critical reaction to Waking Life has been mostly positive. It holds a rating of 80% across 137 reviews on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes — with critical consensus that "he talky, animated Waking Life is a unique, cerebral experience" — and an average score of 82 out of 100 ("universal acclaim") on Metacritic, based on thirty-one reviews. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four, describing it as "a cold shower of bracing, clarifying ideas." Ebert later included the film on his ongoing list of "Great Movies". Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly awarded the film an "A" rating, calling it "a work of cinematic art in which form and structure pursues the logic-defying (parallel) subjects of dreaming and moviegoing", while Stephen Holden of The New York Times said it was "so verbally dexterous and visually innovative that you can't absorb it unless you have all your wits about you".
Conversely, J.

Waking Life Tribute

Waking Life - Situationism

Hoberman of The Village Voice felt that Waking Life "doesn't leave you in a dream ... It was also nominated for the Golden Lion, the festival's main award.
Soundtrack

Soundtrack cover

The Waking Life OST was performed and written by Glover Gill and the Tosca Tango Orchestra, except for one piece of Frédéric Chopin's that was used.

Featuring the nuevo tango style, it bills itself "the 21st Century Tango." The tango contributions were influenced by the music of the Argentine "father of new tango" Ástor Piazzolla. "Hawke and Delpy reunite ‘Before Sunset’ - More news and other features- msnbc.com".