Excellent, uniquelly animated movie with depth. If your want to know more, ask Verbose Buck.

Concise Buck

Blahhh!

I couldn't make it through "Waking Life," even after multiple attempts. The animation was like a full-color Earthlink commercial - that is to say, headache inducing. The "story" of the movie (if you can deign to call it such) was merely a rehash of the same ideas Linklater presented in "Slacker" over ten years ago.

I've got nothing against the guy -- I've met him several times and he's a nice person and has a love for his craft, however he hasn't made a movie that appealed to me since "Dazed and Confused," although I have yet to see "School of Rock," which seems like it might be fun.

I woke up from a strange late-Sunday-afternoon mid-winter nap and walked to the theater to see 'Waking Life.' The philosophy may only be skin-deep, but in that frame of mind, I was perfectly ripe for it. Blew my head. But if I had been fully awake, I probably would have thought it was stupid.

Whatever. I walked out of the theatre into the cool night air and was surprised by how...real everything looked. Somehow, the world didn't look right without all that weird cartoon shit going on in the margins.

I enjoyed "Waking Life" very much. It was sort of like an animated "Slacker", but that's okay with me. I've enjoyed most of Linklater's films.

I'm with Joalco on this one. Waking Life is like reading a philosophy text as opposed to watching a moving image. Film should at least try to illustrate its point visually, as opposed to talking AT you. Sadly, even with the rotoscoping, this movie is 100% exposition, 0% imagination. The visuals were a lot of fun to look at, but all the people yammering on about the meaning of life and the meaning of dreams and other philosophical ballyhoo pretty much eliminated any room for emotional impact. The only parts I liked was when the characters stopped talking for a second.

And BTW, nobody ever talks that coherently in dreams, and memory in dreams operates nothing like Waking Life portrays, so as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't even accurately represent what it's trying to represent.

Watch Kurosawa's Dreams and that will comment on the subject matter of Waking Life far more than Waking Life does.

Wanna go see a good Linklater movie? He directed School of Rock and it's pretty funny.

I loved Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams". It just recently became available on DVD in the U.S.(finally!!!). I think I may go see "School of Rock" this weekend...

It's been a while since I've seen the movie but wasn't it about the 8(?) minutes of brain activity after death? Like a transition period?

Maybe the idea is that the self/mind/soul uses this period of time to ready itself for transfer to the next plane using both every day and abstract ideas and images to allow the ego to part with it's fixation in/on the physcial plane??

Interesting how when he is speaking to that girl he mentions how he thinks he is in a dream state but her ideas are all things that have never occurred to him. Universal subconscience? Universal memory of nature? Crossword puzzles?

I really liked the movie. The animation made me kinda dizzy sometimes though. (or was it them drugs?)