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This chapter examines the use of rotoscoping in Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), in order to realize metaphysical enquiries on film. Within the field of metaphysical enquiry, the key question for characters in the cinema of Linklater appears to be whether the world exists outside the mind. This prompts conceptual musings on the interaction of the mind and the body gives rise to the monologues and dialogues of Slacker (1991) as well as informing those in Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). It also inspires the banter and debate of the protagonists of Waking Life, and the manic monologues of Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) in A Scanner Darkly. The use of rotoscoping for these films, and the relay discussion of metaphysics in these films, is apt because the animation adds an extra level of transcendence sought by saints and philosophers alike to the reality of live action footage.

This introductory chapter provides a background for a study of Richard Linklater's cinema. Born in 1960 and a self-taught filmmaker, Linklater's cine-literacy and philosophical knowledge has often seen him classified as the most European-minded of the American filmmakers who came to prominence with low-budget features in the 1990s and, partly for this reason, he remains one of those most critical voices of contemporary America. The most dominant theme in his cinema is the employment of the slacker-protagonist, which offers imagination and reflection as alternative priorities to competition and profit. In his emblematic debut film Slacker (1991), he used slacking not as laziness, but as a refusal to engage with the fast-track consumerism and aggressive foreign policy of President Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior. Another noteworthy characteristic of Linklater's cinema is his deployment of rotoscoping, which involves the tracing and animating of live action footage in order to explicitly represent metaphysical enquiry. This is particularly seen in Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006).

This chapter examines the use of the tracing of lines over live-action footage, or rotoscoping, in animation practice. In particular, the chapter makes a distinction between rotoscoping by outline, in which the animator traces over the boundaries of an actor’s body at every frame, and rotoscoping by through-line, wherein the animator draws according to lines of force that underlie an actor’s movements. In rotoscoping by through-line, used at Disney, the drawn line seems part of the footage beneath it. In rotoscoping by outline, used by Ralph Bakshi and the Fleischer studio, the line seems partially independent of the footage; this, the chapter argues, is where the oft-noted unsettling quality of some rotoscoping comes from. The chapter then examines a use of rotoscoping by outline in Mary Beams’s film Going Home Sketchbook (1975), which paradoxically has none of this unsettling quality. By having a line snake freely over light values around live-action figures, the film exhibits an intimate, even loving, attachment to its footage.