Anime Review: Waking Life

Review Waking LifeWritten by Warpshadowrating good

Wiley Wiggins a somewhat normal young man who wanders through life and will occasionally fly away if there is nothing important on his mind. Throughout the movie he wanders about and talks to people who have interesting viewpoints on life. Beyond this Waking life has no real plot.

For about 100 minutes Waking Life is a sounding board for people with views on life. Most of these views would be what the philosophical community would label as either surrealism or Existentialism. While some of these speeches are interesting individually as a whole they do not have a single unified narrative. It just gives the view points of many people almost as though they were not the viewpoint of the creator of the movie but rather that the creator of the movie collected those monologues and made a movie out of them.

The animation for Waking life is rotoscoped meaning it was adapted from a live action source. There is some cases were the animation veers of wildly from what could be live action often to some sort of dramatic point. This also causes it to look somewhat wiggly.

Waking life is a movie that is difficult to grade simply because it is so different from most movies animated or otherwise. What I can probably predict is that opinions of the movie will fall into two camps; those who find the movie to be deep and original and those who find the movie to be self important and boring. I think it will depend on the individual viewer’s taste in whether they like so called art films.