I really enjoyed your review Chris. You brought to light many interesting comments on caricature. But honestly, I had mixed feelings about this film itself. I think people should go see what was attempted and support the effort because it is a highly ambitious outing for an independent like Linklater. Despite this, I think his effort largely failed. As a meditation on reality vs. the dreamstate it creates an interesting condition in the viewer. The loquacious philosophizing combined well with the trance inducing jittery imagery to create a powerful sedative effect on me. I spent most of my time fending off my own dreamstate. Intentional or not, it does not make for good filmaking if your viewer is struggling to stay awake. The only way I can see Linklater advancing the popular perception of animation through this film is by his brave decision to deal with intelligent and challenging subject matter - something the producers of other widely released features shy away from. That could open the doors to more mature types of animated films in the future. Beyond that it is technically, at best, a minor advance in rotoscoping techniques in that production artists are apparently freed from having to trace every single frame by hand and keep track of the vector objects they are using to abstract the live action. Since it is computer assisted rotoscopy, the computer is obviously doing what computers do best and helping the animator manage the complexity of elements (brushstrokes, backgrounds, matte layers) thereby freeing up their time to a) engage in more stylistic explorations within the limitations of the software and b) produce ... more animation faster. The downside to this "advance" is that if film producers choose to exploit the b) option, we will get inundated with a spate of "eye candy" films where viewers are subjected to a series of poorly shot films that are "fixed" and "dressed up" in this type of "animation". I've already seen a wave of Waking Life inspired commercial projects that portend to do exactly this: create appliqued "animation". This could do more damage to the popular perception of animation by further reducing it to nothing more than an fancy film processing technique rather than advancing the genre (or rather: meta-genre) of film-making that it actually is: an auteur driven film where the filmaker has control of every discreet frame of film. The problem with rotoscopy has always been the fact that it strips visual design and performance out of the hand of the animator/ director. It puts chains on the artists involved. Especially in a film like this, shot documentary style with little pre-visualization, they are bound compositionally and temporally to a succession of images shot mostly by Richard himself. Images that they did not help to design into existence, and images that he probably felt personally attached to and was unwilling to change. Not that there are a lack of beautifully shot sequences. It's just that I get the sense that many of the artists employed to "animate" this film were just going through the motions and not actually caricaturing anything. Anything they did to "enhance" the footage most certainly had to work within the composition and timing of the underlying footage. They would be hard pressed to depart from this. Nonetheless, there were a handful of truly inspired caricature sequences in Waking Life that completely floored me; the two actors turning to clouds come to mind as does the very minimally treated sequence with the girl at the subway entrance. I felt like the director had finally let the animators depart from the footage for a while and use their own powers of invention here, or perhaps the artist's solution was simply more compelling than what the others came up with. Here the footage felt like merely a template to guide them and inspire them on to further explorations rather than a series of outlines to be traced, jiggled and filled with colour. For the most part, I felt the film to be essentially an elaborate colourization of inexpensive DV footage. I couldn't help but wonder what was under the animation; what the original footage looked like. Impressive mostly for the novelty and boldness of the technique and the visual impact but lacking any true depth of purpose ... beyond perhaps helping to induce sleep.

Glad you liked the article, Daniel. Motion-capture is an interesting case -- like rotoscoping, it at first seems un-artistic, as it appears to be more a mechanical process than a creative one (though you might've gathered from the article that the mystique that seperates the mechanical from the creative is, in my opinion, more hocus-pocus than actuality. The fuss over David Hockney's theories about the use of such devices as the camera obscura by painting's old masters is a testament to how deeply felt that mystique can be.) Motion capture, it seems, is less about animation than it is about costuming and set design -- and, of course, about the physical performance of the person being "captured." In the same way that digital technology has re-invigorated (or at least re-casted) some ancient arts (3-D animation, for instance, being more of an extension of the art of puppetry than of traditional 2-D animation), I think motion capture has great potential to re-invent performing art. To date, there has been no real way to preserve the art of dance, in a fashion that retains the essence of the performance. Filmed dance is usually a very pale shadow of the experience of the performance itself -- the camera is always confounded by the opposing desires to take in the entire body of the dancer, while at the same time wanting to zoom in on the expressive details of the body (the face, the hands), which get blurred out in a full-body long-shot. While the technology isn't there yet, it's possible to imagine a dance being recorded by a motion-capture device, and then being projected afterwards, in three dimensions. In this way one could produce a transcription of a dance that retains the "spatiality" of the original performace -- a viewer could even enter into the dance space, transforming the choroegraphy into a sort of moving sculpture. This of course wouldn't be the same as the performed dance itself (eliminating, as it does, the very present physicality of the dancers, and the risk of failure that's always present in live performance), but it does perhaps point to some genuinely "artistic" possibilities of the technology. If the article was a "challenge," I sincerely hope you take me up on it...

Wow, wow, wow. This was a wonderful essay, toucing on so many ideas in animation and film as well: rotoscoping's status as the scourge of animation technique, the history of ethnicity in film, etc. When I saw Waking Life, I felt like it opened up possibilities in animation that hadn't been seen before; at least not by as large an audience as Richard Linklater can attract. In conjunction with the film, this essay provides a fascinating indication of where those possibilities could go, while leaving their ultimate results unsaid, almost as a challenge to artists who read it. It could, and maybe even should, be included in future reissues of the Waking Life DVD, in order to tgive the film's audience even more to think about. Speaking of Snow White's rotoscoping: does anybody get a similar feeling watching Motion-Capture footage, like in Final Fantasy, or motion-capture work from SF's Protozoa?