The Republic

Rotoscope.

Waking Life is a live action film that has been manually altered one frame at a time in a process known as rotoscoping. The process involves artists painting over the original images. Richard Linklater had some thirty artists involved in the process, each artist in turn added their own unique style to the film. This juxtaposition of varied styles, colors and movement creates the intentional affect of being in a dream.

The dream effect.

Much like the Wachowski sibling's trilogy, The Matrix, and Lewis Carol's, Alice Through the Looking Glass, the question of dreams and the definition of waking (real) life is brought into question. In the same way Book VII of The Republic brings into question the distinction between the real and the cave and how to discern one from the other. But unlike the previously mentioned literary works, Waking Life, physically attempts to express the dream/the cave vividly in a surreal way that reflects the nature of the cave which, "holds that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of artificial things" (515c), is nothing but a misconception of truth, ultimately an illusion preventing the discovery of truth.  This extensive contrast resembles the difference between what is within the cave and what is outside its confines, "Take a man who is released and suddenly compelled to stand up, to turn his neck around, to walk and look up towards the light; and who, moreover, in doing all this is in pain and because he is dazzled, is unable to make out those things whose shadow he saw before" (515d). The physical contrast emphasizes the stark difference between the "artificial" and the truth. As Socrates describes using Homers words, "'To be on the soil, a serf to another man, to a portionless man,' and to undergo anything whatsoever rather than to opine those things and live that way?" (516d), that humans who have savored life outside the cave, who have come to know truth, would rather suffer than return to the cave.