WAKING LIFE

Having read a tantalizing piece in the paradigm-shifty zine Rez, I made
sure to see Waking Life the day it opened, just to assess the hype.
My advice: Run, don't walk.
It might not be around too much longer. The distributor opened it on
Wednesday on one screen; it's arty, talky, experimental; no stars, sex,
violence. So it may not have "legs" after all the film and art students
have seen it.

I found it by turns exhilarating, irritating, beautiful, wise, fun, and
profoundly dumb. After the first few soliloquies it is evident that
Linklater's script is sophomoric rubbish, composed of serial
bullsessions one might encounter in Austin among stoned grad students.
The main character is a gangly, Slacker Redux androge drifting passively
from one orator to the next. OK, near the end he achieves a kind of
insight, which may erase some of the shaggy-dog smell on your hands.

But do watch it. Give your eyes a treat, even if you get a little seasick.

We all know film reviewers can't write about animation because they're
too enchanted by celebrity, literature, and theater, all of which are
irrelevant to what's going on up on the screen.

Is it really animation? Of course. Even though it was rotoscoped from a
DV source, with all the rhythms of loosely-edited, hand held live
action. In only a few scenes, though, are we interested in its character
animation: exaggerated facial tics, rubbery limbs, levitation. Often
this animation resorts to very lame sight gags that illustrate or
comment on the characters speech, e.g. a guy's face appears to fill up
with liquid when he says that the body is 95% water or his head turns
into a gear as he says he'd like to be gear (maybe they were different
characters, but it really doesn't matter).

In other words I found those "comic" moments which are the traditional
realm of the animator to be the weakest in the film. Those also happened
to be the moments that elicited audience laughter at the Union Square
screening. That makes me think I was really out of it or the audience
was just eager to let off some tension created by the film's unrelenting
logorrhea.

But if we think of animation as an open-ended method of playing
graphically, of structuring and restructuring shapes and color in time,
as an Art, not just a technique or mechanical apparatus, then WL has to
be considered a breakthrough film. This purely visual appreciation is
based on its design, backgrounds, and what I'd have to call its
composition, a term which includes not just compositing but the novel
attitude (itself a subject of the rambling soundtrack) to each scene's
molecular structure.

1. Paint-By-The-Numbers. Posterization. Sabiton's Software. Whatever you
call it, it defines the WL look. The photographic image of each frame
contains a limited palette, "artistically" selected I assume. The shaded
areas on faces are often reduced to a few topographic pools of color
(somewhat like the "Woodcut" filter in Painter 6), backgrounded areas
are usually flatter. It seems that old characters, with more lines and
folds get rendered in a highly detailed way that pushes their
complexity. When the faces are given a totally flat rendering (as in the
red-faced convict and the auto speechmaker) the effect is quite
startling.

This automatic colorizing has a definite design consequence: shapes are
not defined by line as in a traditional 2D cartoon. Thus frontal and 3/4
faces are nose less with emphasis focusing on eyes, mouth, and shadows;
hair seems to often have a life of its own as if vector strokes are
cycling on a random seed. There is a wide range of stylization with
characters pushed or pulled from scene to scene depending on the
animator/designer in charge. This provides its own excitement and seems
appropriate to the episodic structure of the story. And above all, it's
loose and never really takes itself too seriously.

2. Ever since Gertie the Dinosaur animators have been contriving means
to separate subject from background: trace backs, cutouts, cels--each
providing its own esthetic and dynamism. To avoid deadly frozen grounds
the WL designers opt for a constantly fluid field of planes which seem
to float in and out of perspectival logic, even when the live cam is
locked off. It looks like what may have started off as an LSD (labor
saving device) ends up being a perfect trope for a universe unhinged.
It's actually quite funny that the hero is told that he can tell if he's
in a dream by flicking a light switch to no effect (which he does), when
the riotous scene before him is composed of impossible, drunken plate
tectonics. There are specific background moments, actually cutaways only
a few seconds long, like the tracking shot of a convenience store candy
rack, which are startlingly and scrumptious.

The downside to all the layering occurs when elements tend to look the
same from frame to frame. Ears and eyeglasses always tend to be swimming
about on their axis. These repurposed characters have a Frankensteinish
patchwork nature as if reassembled from cloned body parts, always
threatening to pull off into another unintentional orbit.


3. Not having read any detailed description of the methodology leads me
to suspect that Sabiton may be planning to patent or, lord knows, market
or serialize it. Rotoscope may be too limited a term for what actually
amounts to a recomposing or collaging of the live action. And ultimately
the technology is secondary to the design. WL is light-years away from
geeky 3D puppetry. Even though created on a bunch of G4's it seems to
wallow in funky, painterly, avant-garde experimentalism, as if "mistakes"
were sort of strung together to form a coherent esthetic. David
Hockney's delicious photo-collages seem to have been covertly
inspirational, not to mention the wan pictorialism of Alex Katz, Tom
Tomorrow, and Daniel Clowes.

So, in the end I was bowled over, not by the nattering nabobs whose
mouths were always in sync with voices by famous and unfamous alike, not
by the animation (which I'd have to call "bad"), but by the sheer
audacity of moving pictures which appear to be on semi-automatic pilot, while
anatomies and landscapes teeter in a mad tango of Euclidean improbability.

George Griffin NYC 10/11/01