Animating the Visions of Richard Linklater
Keanu Reeves, Ethan Hawke, Jack Black and Matthew McConaughey all make an appearance in an all-new movie. Not as actors, though – this group of celebrities join together in the new documentary 21 Years: Richard Linklater to celebrate and discuss the real-life character of movie director Richard Linklater. Linklater has been making films since 1985. He had his first breakthrough with movies said to have direct influence on the so-called indie revolution of the 90s with cult classics Slacker (1991) and Dazed and Confused (1993). Most recently, he won widespread renown for the movie Boyhood (2014). Boyhood captivated audiences who had never heard of Linklater before since it was filmed over a timeline of 12 years, all with the same actors, showcasing their development and the passage through time in an authentic and original way. In 21 Years, interviews with celebrities and directors are sometimes animated with cartoon-like characters. Animation studio Powerhouse Animation, headquartered in Austin, Texas, took the lead in crafting these, which works well for the director on two different levels: he also is known for laying roots in Austin, and his films reveal a fascination with animation. Linklater & Rotoscoping Linklater’s oeuvre reveals a fascination with the animated arts. In two of his movies within the first decade of 2000, he enlisted the help of animation production studios to ‘rotoscope’ live action. Rotoscoping is a process of animation by which live action is filmed and then used, frame-by-frame, as one might use stencils. Animators trace the desired object or figure through each frame, and then dispense with the original film, revealing a cartoonish moving figure
whose movements and shape come directly from real-life images. The technique produces a strangely lifelike yet simple animation that glides across the screen in bold lines and blocks of color. This form of animation may sound simple, but it can produce many different variations of mood and style. For example, if animators only choose to animate one or two subjects from the live action shots, and they outline these figures with a loose hand as they would in a quick sketch, animators can create a jumpy, dynamic, and more abstract and symbolic form. On the other hand, with more precision and finessed borders, the animation becomes graceful and subtle. In both cases, the ever-changing lines coupled with lifelike movements create an uncanny experience that’s suggestive, mysterious, and captivating. Linklater chiefly used rotoscoping in the films Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). Both were fully filmed for rotoscope animation, and thus prove to be significant investments in the art form. With great experiments come great amounts of work: imdb.com reports that for every single minute of film in A Scanner Darkly, 350 minutes of work were required to handdraw over that portion of live action, frame by frame. “Waking� to the Power of Animation
Waking Life is a perfect case study of animation’s power and possibility. Linklater does in Waking Life what many before had either failed to do or feared to attempt. He takes wild, fascinating ideas, and uses animation to usher them into an understandable format for a fascinated audience. In the movie, the ‘main character’ can’t tell whether he is awake or asleep, and as the movie progresses, he comes to believe he is stuck in never-ending dreams-within-dreams. As he realizes that the act of waking up continually eludes him, he learns in a series of scenes that the truth of ‘being awake’ in life is just as elusive a concept. In each scene, the idea of ‘real life’ is questioned: characters question the value of ‘real life’ as opposed to dreamt life. Then they analyze the ‘meaning’ of ‘real life’ as it regards humanity as a species on an evolutionary path, as existential beings experiencing their own radical possibilities resulting from free will and selfdirection, and as political animals, with more choices and convictions than any one of us may admit or realize. Linguistics, literature, philosophy, and superstition also get spokespersons to pontificate and mystify audience members. The chorus of confusing ideas is ushered in by the loose lines of rotoscope, and it does lend a dreamlike sensation to the film. With so many ideas and such radical themes, the cartoonish imagery gives audience members a heaping spoonful of sugar to help the sometimes monotonous medicine go down. With such dynamic animation, it’s easy to forgive characters’ long-winded lectures; with such a new and exciting form of animation, the audience is also primed to entertain similarly cutting edge ideas. Most importantly, the animation can support the main character’s feeling of claustrophobia. It certainly is frightening to imagine oneself stuck inside a dream, never to escape. But the genius of using this animation is that, in this movie, we truly are stuck inside a different interpretation of visual life: that’s what a movie is – what an animated movie is, most precisely. Though the animation is expressive in helping to deliver the film’s main plot, central idea, and mood, by the end of the film, audience members will likely identify with the main character’s claustrophobia. We wish to return to the real, naturally animated world, too. This is the mark of great movies, animation, art and auteurs: participation in the created piece inspires one to love the artful object as well as the object of art, life.