A Scanner Darkly is a 2006 movie with Keanu Reeves,Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr. based on the Philip K Dick novel of the same name. The story revolves around a narcotics agent, who also poses as a drug user, and gradually gets more and more involved into the lifestyle of his junkie friends.
The film makes use of a technique that saw some amazing movies back in the days. Rotoscoping, although it never became very popular, is a style, where the movie is shot in live action, and later on hand drawn images are layered over the footage in order to create the effect of an animated film with a full 3D depth panning and tilting of the camera.
As far as the story goes A Scanner Darkly is reminiscent of movies such as Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream, The Acid House, although the 1977 book far predates the sources of those titles. Other titles that make use of the rotoscoping technique are Waking Life and Sin City.
