“Waking Life” is a film by Richard Linklater released on 2001 in USA.
The whole story is the amazing adventure of a young boy, acted by Wiley Wiggins, who goes around a tipical American city experiencing strange encounters.
The film was edited in rotoscope that is a kind of cinematographic way for representing characters and settings as if they were a cartoon, but the characters are real actors. This expedient was effectively for the mood of the narration, because is seems like the boy was having lucid dreams. The main topics dealt with are actually philosophical and demanding but the way they are told makes them fascinating also for a dude.
The young protagonist experienced on first person many different small conversations or situations of real life. Each one represents an aspect of the most unanswered existential question. Therefore some are positive but other express totally all the inconvenience of the modern consumer society.
For example, during an informal conversation between two girls at the bar they astound each other speaking about the total regeneration of our cells that happens every 7 years, instead in scene a man use violence because of his desperation. Despite this the boy never tires of going around and even listens to a monkey’s speech about art.
The choose of the soundtrack was really winner, it was written and executed by Glover Gill and Tosca Tango, with the exeption of Fryederyk Chopin’s op. n. 9.
This film has won many awards like, for example, one at the Venice Film Festival and at the Golden Lion Prize, in my opinion it absolutely deserves all the honors received. My favourite point is that the film renders many philosophical questions simple and gives evidence that some times reality could be really close to the dreams.