30 Second Bottom Line: It's a safe bet that Waking Life is unlike anything you've seen before. This feature length animated film is done using a unique process by which live action footage of real people is transformed into animation. The result is something like a painting that has come to life. The process is totally integrated into the theme of the film because it is about the place where reality and imagination come together. It is the closest thing to filming a dream ever. The characters are doubly life like and intriguing because we can see that they have the texture, nuance, and uniqueness of real people. They are then blended with computer and hand painted animation. Add intense and thought-provoking dialog to the mix for a 97 minute cinematic wallop.

Story Line: Wiley Wiggins arrives in town and calls his friend from the station to ask for a ride home. While on the phone, he makes eye contact with an attractive woman sitting nearby. The look between the two lingers just long enough to make you feel the momentary musings of these two people who do not speak but both know that a connection has been made. Wiley then walks out to the street to find a cab. What he finds instead is a boat-car driven by a sort of Fantasy Island guide who pulls up to offer him a ride. The vehicle rides on wheels but has the interior and exterior of a small inboard boat. There is another passenger already in the boatcar.

They begin to drive but Wiley does not know where to tell the driver to go so the passenger gives directions to a corner a few blocks away. When Wiley steps out, he is hit by a car. As he wakes from the accident, he begins a dream journey that has him talking to, though mostly listening to, or simply observing many different people who talk about a wide array of ideas.

He is one moment in a classroom and then a café talking to a man about existentialism. The man, a professor, explains that Sartre never spent a day in despair in his life because he knew the real core of existence means believing in the possible that allows you can create your own existence although most people think the opposite. The next moment we see a man and a woman talking in bed (looking remarkably like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy). They are discussing the nature of dreams and collective memory. They ponder over how a complex dream can go on for hours but when you wake up and look at the clock only a minute has passed from when you last looked at the clock. The notion of time and its essence keeps popping up to perplex Wiley and through him, us too.

Then we are back with Wiley again talking to a man in a gas station. The man is filling a gas can. He is frowning and expounding on how the self-destructive person sees the world. They begin to walk down the street and the man asks Wiley for a match. When he finishes his monologue, he douses himself with gas, lights the match and roasts. A couple walking by stop, then shrug and move on.

One encounter has a philosopher contemplating why it is that humans have essentially not progressed, except technologically, beyond ancient Greeks of 3000 years ago. Wiley moves on to various cities, neighborhoods, places and rooms, mostly participating in the moment but sometimes as a unseen spectator, as in the prison cell of an angry, vengeance filled inmate spewing loudly to no one. Wiley keeps waking from the dream only to discover that he is still in it.

Tell Me More About It: Director Richard Linklater shot exteriors in Austin, San Antonio, and New York. However nothing truly identifying appears in the film to set an authentic locale. This further accents the fanciful quality.

The cast of characters is vastly different from one another sharing only the characteristics that each is fascinating and all are vibrant, thinking persons. For the most part, they share an optimistic viewpoint and search for the possibility, the probability, the plausibility, and the likelihood of what life might offer. Many of them experience a powerful belief in the value of human connections. This engaging, if nebulous, plot line is intensified a thousand fold by the frame-by-frame computer animation done by a team of artists in a painstaking, computer software aided process developed by art director Bob Sabiston. The boatcar driver and the woman at the train station both reappear in other places as different characters that are familiar to Wiley.

After a series of these encounters, Wiley confides to a man who sits in a church like place that he had been dreaming but now he isn't sure if it was a dream or real. He wants to wake up but cannot. At this point, we are sharing Wiley's uncertainty over the line between the waking and dreaming, real and not. He is told that there are signs to look for to distinguish the real from the illusory. The man suggests trying the light switches to see if they really work the lights. If they do, you are awake and if they don't you are dreaming. He cheerfully advises that it is probably best to just stay with the dream because it is way more fun. Its gets a bit alarming for Wiley as he continues on his foray through this waking life because he does not feel in control of events or whether he or anyone, can really wake up. In the end, Linklater leaves it to us to decide.