It is rare for a director to return to a film and improve it but Linklater does it here. Taking the general form of Slackers, he adds a metaphysical story line and coats it with extraordinary eye candy.

The rotoscoping really provides an acid trip experience of constantly shifting planes with backgrounds going one way and characters going the other.

The string quartet tango score also is an excellent use of music to reinforce the exotic aspects of the production.

The monologues are thought provoking and compelling. The story line examining dream/death connection is novel. Score points for originality of story, art direction and narrative line. Some quite funny parts (e.g. boat car, bar shoot out, etc.),some creepy parts (e.g. jailbird rant, second boat man meeting, etc.).

I have seen this several times and enjoyed it every time. Farily rare is the movie that can really stand up to multiple viewings. This is one.

Very refreshing. See it.

A young man (Wiley Wiggins) talks to people he encounters about existential meaning. There are also various other people talking about various things. It's a lot of metaphysical gobity gook. The style of the animation is fascinating and I stayed with Wiggins for the first 20 minutes. It's weird and a cool experimental animation. I could care less about what these people say. It's meaningless and might as well be white noise.

Then there is a section with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in bed. They're having a different version of their conversation in 'Before Sunrise'. It's compelling cinema for someone like me who loves that movie. After that, the movie has more gobity gook and it loses me completely. This could be a great style to do with interviews with compelling real world figures. I can imagine this with Dalai Lama or a President. This becomes unwatchable but I'm intrigued by Linklater's dream-like experiment. I only wish his experiment didn't put me to sleep.

I was very curious to watch "Waking Life" and I expected a great movie. I was wrong! There are positive aspects, practically the originality and the adopted technique in the animation. Unfortunately, the shallow plot is simply awful, based on philosophy of readers of cartoons and pseudo-intellectuals. The wavy animations and the tedious story make the eyes very tired, and I slept many times along this 101 minutes running time, a nightmare with dreams. I do not recall how many times I had to press the rewind button to see the scene again. By the quantity of persons related in the cast, I believe that director and writer Richard Linklater is very well connected with people of the cinema industry that probably helped him promoting this overrated, pretentious and extremely boring film. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Waking Life"