Richard Linklater's 2001 film Waking Life is being revisited as a genre-defying indie masterpiece that used innovative rotoscoped animation to explore dreams, consciousness and reality. The film follows an unnamed protagonist, played by Wiley Wiggins, as he drifts through Austin, Texas, uncertain whether he is awake or dreaming, encountering a stream of philosophers, artists and eccentrics who muse on existence, politics and the nature of perception.

The entire film was hand-drawn over live footage using rotoscoping, a technique dating back to 1915, with a different animator assigned to each sequence so the visual style shifts alongside the film's tone; it was shot on inexpensive consumer DV cameras with a loose, evolving script and open casting for its offbeat characters. Wiggins, speaking about the film 25 years on, recalls the free-flowing production process and reflects on how the film's themes of lucid dreaming and blurred reality still resonate, noting that "the last 10 years have been a series of rude awakenings, one after another."