Waking Life

Richard Linklater’s dreamy, spacey, sensually anti-gravitational movie is a genuine novelty – both technically and temperamentally. It’s an animated feature, if that adjective can really be applied to one of the most laid-back films it is possible to see. Linklater and his art director Bob Sabiston use live-action sequences with flesh-and-blood actors, filmed and cut together in the conventional way and then animated images are derived from this footage, in a kind of "tracing-over" effect: hi-tech rotoscoping. The result is very wacky: automobiles throb; buildings pulse; the sky shifts and wheels, and perspectives and sightlines never remain entirely in place. Something that looks disconcertingly like physical reality is perpetually swarming and re-settling and re-configuring itself: an effect which is comic, playful, but also disturbing. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, Friday April 19, 2002