Like Paprika, Richard Linklater's experimental animated film Waking Life is concerned with the precipice between the conscious and the unconscious, but here the philosophising stands in the foreground and openly invites the audience to engage with its ideas. A young man crosses a street and spies a note floating across the ground; as he rushes to grasp it a car speeds towards him. Waking Life takes these enigmatic shots as a starting point for a serious of discussions about the nature of reality and existence. An exploration of the existential, in a sense this is an accumulation of Linklater's previous movies which have touched upon these questions, this time around exploring them in full. While Waking Life's animation was rotoscoped, the animators have chosen to exaggerate and embellish the actor's movements, resulting in something more appropriately dreamy and fluid and in keeping with the increasingly vague place the film inhabits.
