Richard Linklater's first animated work, a painterly extension of reality, is astoundingly lovely and touching. He shot the material as a live-action feature and then turned the footage over to a team of animation artists, headed by Bob Sabiston, who enhanced and decorated each sequence. The resulting interplay between words and animation is both haunting and startlingly witty. What we see is an unformed young man (Wiley Wiggins) walking around Austin, Texas, where he encounters the coffeehouse Kierkegaards and ecstatically articulate bums who populated Linklater's initial triumph, Slacker. (Most of the participants are local celebrities, not actors.) The young man thinks he's awake, but actually he's caught in an endless dream. Since the talk he hears is directed toward themes of reverie, apprehension, and death, we begin to wonder, after a while, if we are not witnessing his last moments of consciousness.