Anyone familiar with Richard Linklater's earlier animated film "Waking Life" knows it played across the screen like a Dilettante Chocolate - a sumptuous pleasure if consumed in small bites.

Linklater's animation technique is beautiful to distraction; scenes are shot live and then illustrated, frame-by-frame, creating a startling hybrid of replication and decoration. The actors playing the roles are at one moment easy to identify and in the next fade into cartoons.

This painterly effect can take on a woozy life of its own-a quality that Linklater played up in "Waking Life"-where everything, and every one, seemed to be pulsing. All in all, a lot of fun to watch for a little while, but difficult to settle into for the long haul.

"A Scanner Darkly", now playing at the Admiral, represents a welcome maturity of technique, allowing story to regain mastery over style.

The story is about an undercover narcotics officer, Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) who is trying to work his way up the distribution chain of the latest drug to hit the streets. He ends up sharing a house with a small group of junkies he hopes will lead him to bigger fish.

It is in this run-down dump that the movie finds its home. In a world that has hallucinations hanging around the edges, Linklater's animation style starts to make a lot of sense. It begins to feel like a natural extension of a junky's altered perceptions rather than a film school conceit.

The little doped-up community lounging in the cluttered living room is a treasure of excellent actors working with equally excellent dialog. James (Robert Downey Jr.), Ernie (Woody Harrelson), and Freck (Rory Cochrane) are more than Arctor's prey, they are his only true friends and-for the brief remaining time before the drug destroys them-the most alive people he knows. They bring a twisted wit that is the best reason to see this movie. They babble through clever lines and bounce around the screen like the Marx Brothers on meth. While Linklater tries to paint a downbeat vision of reality, his movie works best as comedy.

Robert Downey Jr. is particularly good, capturing the addled intellectualism of a brilliant man sunk deep into addiction. His rambling 911 call to save an unconscious Ernie is painfully hilarious.

As Donna, Arctor's addict girlfriend, Winona Ryder doesn't quite get her share of the gonzo humor, but she's a strong actress who oozes personality; a fact that may give us a clue as to why this movie works so well as animation. Among the supporting cast there is personality-ooze to spare and it bubbles up through the illustrated veneer, keeping the characters and the story very much alive.

Which brings us back to our hero; as we all know, when it comes to personality Reeves is pretty much ooze-free. In this movie that may prove to be a virtue. Linklater's larger story about a society that has traded liberty for constant surveillance in an ineffectual attempt to control a drug epidemic needs a character to embody the institutional depression that results-and Reeves does bureaucracy very well.

The true villains may reside in the shadows of the corporate world rather than on the streets but Arctor and his colleagues lack any ability to police the powers above them. Instead the police hope to get their break by spying on the paranoid antics of petty addicts. The guilty pleasure of "A Scanner Darkly" is that they are so entertaining to watch.

Bruce Bulloch can be reached via wseditor@robinsonnews.com