As far as a storyline, there’s not much to it. Wiley Wiggins (Dazed and Confused) plays the main character, known simply as “The Dreamer” – as with most dreams, there are no names in this lucid dreamscape – who begins the film in a childhood memory where a young girl playing that folding paper game with him reads his fortune, “dream is destiny.” From this succinctly prophetic statement, The Dreamer floats off to his dream world, dipping in and out of intellectually philosophical rants about evolution, predetermination, and free will.

      A lucid dream is a dream that someone is aware they are in – a half reality, half subconscious state -- which allows them to consciously guide and shape their own dream. For The Dreamer, he realizes that there is a purpose to his lucidity; that his mind is on a quest for something he can’t quite put a finger on. Most of the time he’s a passive participant in some coffee shop philosopher jive, and in others he’s just another fly on the wall as people hold heartfelt pontifications about human existence. They are all part of a thought process locked deep down inside his own psyche. From particle dynamic theory applied to human predetermination to the neo-evolution of man, much of the film plays something akin to wire-tapping Friedrich Nietzsche’s brain after letting him smoke crack. In one wonderfully exhausting scene, Timothy “Speed” Levitch (from the indie documentary hit “The Cruise”) spouts out “on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion.” Right. Those of us who are not grad school philosophers or die-hard fans of existentialism will probably be worn out from the weightiness of the intellectual dialogue, though it’s moments like these that keep the film lively and interesting.

      The film cleverly toggles from first to third person, and back again. Its impressionistic animation style is free flowing and immersive, and gives a multidimensional personality to the characters. Even if the dialogue loses you after a while, your eyes will be dancing in their sockets. Because painters rotoscoped on top of live action footage, all those little nuances in facial and body expressions -- like hesitation in the eyes, or that anticipation in someone’s face when they eagerly want to interject something to the conversation but are reluctantly waiting for your point to be made first – are included and even accentuated by the film’s brilliant animators. In one terrific scene, where a grad student explains how the physical laws that govern particles lend credence to the argument of predetermination, we see atoms dressed in beach attire and knight’s garb dancing and duking it out over the student’s shoulder while he gabs. The film is filled with creative spices like this, and it’s probably safe to say that you’ve never seen and will never see again anything like it.

      So what is the point to all of this? We see dozens of folks pondering the meaning of their existence and posing other questions with no answers. It’d be easy to label the film as “Being Richard Linklater,” but there is more to it. Waking Life poignantly tells us that curiosity is the quest and drive of humanity, not the answer. Need there be an answer? I guess not.

Stephen Wong, 2001