Waking Life and Liquid Caricature
The filmmakers, the animators, the actors -- they all turn toward the eyes when they're hunting for spirit, for essence.
And isn't caricature, when all is said and done, about essence?
Carracci, according to Gombrich, offered an early defense of caricature, on grounds that its impulses were the same as those of the more refined, more "profound" arts:
"Is not the caricaturist's task exactly the same as the classical artist's? Both see the lasting truth beneath the surface of mere outward appearance. Both try to help nature accomplish its plan. The one may strive to visualize the perfect form and to realize it in his work, the other to grasp the perfect deformity, and thus reveal the very essence of a personality. A good caricature, like every work of art, is more true to life than reality itself."
It's interesting that here, the defense is still couched in purely negative terms: the "perfect deformity." It's certainly true that caricature is often employed to make the subject less human. But the apparent contradiction caricature is based on -- namely, that distortion can make something more itself -- is more fundamental than its application toward deformity. Hirshfeld, for instance, elevates his subjects as much as he kids them, making their iconic presence concrete, indelible. Hirshfeld, though, the great chronicler and mythologist of the stage and screen, is essentially capturing a performative mask. His caricatures rarely have that intimate sense that accrues to the characters in Waking Life, where the caricatures seem exploratory and provisional.
The simplified self can be a more intimate self, a more familiar self. The memories we have of people tend not to be photographic -- when we think of a close friend, we don't think of every pore and pimple, we can't enumerate every eyelash -- we have more of an essence, a refined caricature. This is the effect that is rendered on all the characters in Waking Life, even the ones that aren't exaggerated, the ones who are "captured" without the extravagances of caricature. We're given the memory of their form without the intercession of time -- as if memories could take place in present tense.
Like dream and like memory, the characters and the world they inhabit in Waking Life are constantly in flux. There is a jittery wobble that seems to arise from the rotoscope process: the accumulated imperfections between the eye, the hand and the rendering surface. It's a sense of inconstancy that worked well for Koko the clown, but which was ordinarily the bane of the rotoscoper's existence during the photochemical era of the technique. In Waking Life it's wholly embraced, and almost set on a pedestal of aesthetic principle. The caricature becomes a liquid caricature, with the physiognomic exaggerations erupting and then subsiding, almost as though these physical particularities were merely adjuncts to a deeper animating force.
A bravura sequence of animation in Waking Life is the monologue of Eamonn Healy, a professor and chemist who believes humanity is reaching a new stage of evolution, at the threshold of becoming the "neo-human." He talks excitedly, skipping from one thought to another, too rapidly to keep up with; his hands lunge out in explosive swipes at the air. The animator treats Healy's head and face like a restless blob of mercury, or a caffeinated amoebae, threatening to make some quantum evolutionary leap. His limbs swerve and snake beyond the limits of anatomy, stretching like rubber.
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