Any fx work costs $, so often the fx creation experience gets farmed out to do commercials which pay boat loads. So i'm guessing, but those commercials you've seen recently probably funded much of this movie. And since this is not a traditional movie which surprisingly follows the book fairly closely, so maybe final cut decisions we're kept by Linklater, instead of giving more control to the movie studio. It's an edgier film with more idiosyncracies, and less mainstream oriented. Either you get into the disorientation or find something else.
Robert Downey Jr./Dick's writing steals the movie.
As for the animation again, the movie is slightly different then the commercials. The commercials are all close facial shots. There are those in the movie but more attention to detail has gone into them. The real animation stand out is the rest of the images in the frame. The pulled back shots/establishment shots are fantastic, you get the complete sense of reality but twerk'd. Then as the camera movies, similar to anime videos, less important images use the same angle, so the room spins, but the angle of a chair in the room doesn't change at the same rate, thus everything gets this quirky feel, this in addition to the dialog of drug user/abuser/paranoids/tweekers transports you somewhere else. The movie is about questioning reality, the main character is two distinct individuals, created from drug use. The plot then twists and turns to show how reality viewed by the main character is being manipulated by opposing forces, ones commonly recognizable, and like other good sci-fi, easily comparable to the situations around you the reader/viewer.
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