Rating of
1/4
Is there such thing as 'too intellectual'?
mimschkin - wrote on 01/25/10
I'm sure this film was ground-breaking at the time for its unique animation style, which sort of jiggles across the screen in a liquid fashion, but this film is not one that I would recommend. The 'story' is that a boy experiences various lucid dreams in which he talks to numerous intellectual and academic boffins about the general topic of 'life and stuff'. While the film is fairly good at conveying a dream-like state through the wibbly animation, the whole thing seems portentous and self-important. Scenes like one where some professor is going on about existentialism I'm sure are very interesting, but all I can think of is the fact that his moustache is jiggling somewhere across the screen, whilst his face is doing something completely different at the other side of the screen. Overall, a very tedious film, whose purpose appears to be to communicate how intellectual the writers are? I'm understanding all the concepts conveyed in it, but the thing is, I just don't care. Yes, I know that some people think life is like a lucid dream - only you have control over it. But I don't really care. If you're interested in animation, Waking Life will be interesting for about ten minutes until the endless babbling starts to get on your nerves, at which point you'll probably be asking yourself why you didn't decide to watch A Scanner Darkly, which uses the same animation technique and actually isn't full of itself.
