Becoming one with Wile E. Coyote

I SAW “Ice Age: The Meltdown” the other day. The movie’s acorn-obsessed squirrel alone is worth the price of admission. The simplicity of the animal’s goal, in combination with the complexity of its circumstances and the elasticity of its limbs and features, lend new meaning to the term “expressionism.” Watching this desperate creature r-e-e-e-e-a-a-ch is a physical experience.

Or it should be. A lot of adults can’t really do that anymore. That’s why cartoons work mostly for kids, who haven’t yet acquired layers of grown-up insulation. Empathic physicality is a kid’s mode of being in the world -- and that’s what animation depends on. It’s all about your body fusing with one on screen and living in it vicariously.

When an animated movie has halfway intelligent content -- such as, say, “Hoodwinked” or “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” -- it’s a bonus. But it isn’t necessary. Typically, content introduces kids to pop culture (there are always hip-hop allusions), slang usage (“Yeah, right”) and cliche templates (family, true love, cue the music). But on the level of empathic physicality, you tune all that out and just enjoy living in other bodies for a while.

Marcel Proust has great descriptions of what reading meant to him as a boy. In one, he explains why fictional characters were much closer to him than real people. Real people, he says, are essentially unknowable. There are places behind their eyes where you will never be admitted. That’s one reason we rely so heavily on routine. And that’s why, at random moments, routine gets pierced and we find ourselves gazing at a parent or a spouse -- and suddenly we think, my God, who is this person?

But fictional characters we know completely. Because we make them up. What we read incites our imagination to construction. Fictional characters are completely accessible because they are made out of the reader’s mind.

Something like this distinguishes animated beings from real actors. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s close. A real actor cannot help but bring residual evidence of his other life into the screen character. Because, as a real person, the actor is opaque, the character is also opaque. That is why different actors play the same character in sometimes radically different ways. Think Lee J. Cobb versus Dustin Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman.” This is so obvious we take it for granted.

A real actor cannot be his character.

But an animated being is completely transparent. No one else can play it because no one is playing it in the first place. What you see is what you get. There’s no “behind.” There’s nothing to penetrate because nothing blocks you.

Unlike a fictional character in a book, an animated being isn’t the product of your imagination. But thanks to the magic of empathic physicality, you can fuse with it another way. When the Acme safe lands on it, you get squashed. When it smashes into a wall, your face flattens. When it topples from an impossibly high cliff and plummets into invisibility, its cry diminishing in proportion to the distance, you feel yourself evaporating as it disappears from view.

These reflections are about to be put to the test -- and, judging by the trailer for Richard Linklater’s forthcoming “A Scanner Darkly,” they are about to be confirmed. Thanks to rotoscope technology, a regular movie with real actors is “painted over” (that’s the effect; I’m not sure about the actual process) and transformed into an animated movie. An earlier Linklater film, “Waking Life,” used rotoscope too, but it was an arty enterprise. “A Scanner Darkly” looks like a straight-up, sci-fi noir flick starring Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr.

Or animated expressions of them, I should say. And there’s something about the simplification involved -- the flatness and weightlessness, the silken stutter of gesture and expression that distills personality to an essence. It’s as if you are inhaling a spiritual perfume.

Thanks to the trailer of “A Scanner Darkly,” I have fused with Winona Ryder’s cartoonized body. I feel like I know what it would be like to actually be Ryder.

Fun. But not as much fun as being Robert Downey Jr.