Adolfo Bioy Casares’ short novel The Invention of Morel (La invención de Morel, 2003[1940]) envisioned the wish of human beings to define themselves through technology, indeed to reanimate the human as a technological double in an environment that gradually becomes virtual. This article develops the relationships connecting The Invention of Morel with three animating forms – the phantasmagoria, the automaton, and the machine-environment – to stress the privileged association they make between invention and (re)animation. With this purpose, this article examines key contributions to our understanding of simulation and automata in the field of animation theory, such as Alan Cholodenko’s ‘Speculations on the animation automaton’, but also Joubert-Laurencin’s La lettre volante. Quatre essais sur le cinema d’animation, which directly addresses Bioy Casares’ story as a metaphor of animated cinema. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical approach to the field of aesthetics in ‘The Uncanny’, and subsequent theories like Masahiro Mori’s ‘The Uncanny Valley’, are also taken into consideration.