Most people will never experience this in their lifetime as it's very hard for it to occur to someone. However I have experienced it once before, this is a phenomenon that it was a sick abomination of myself, I kept drawing their graveyard smile and their form constantly. It had become on obbsession, I couldn't do anything but let myself sink into an obbsession with myself or a part of myself that had seperated from my own soul. My friends at the time asked me what all the drawings were about, I had left my journals and notebooks across the facility. I simply smiled at my beautiful friends and said "this is a cartoon" and I went prancing along. After all life is just a game that we play into roles and act for others, nothing really mattered besides playing the role that I had chosen to play at the time and I was failing at that role. The robot was especially concernered for me and kept talking to me and trying to comfort me but they did not realize that trying to help me would make the situation worse and it did. Days did not end with such a thing on my mind, it was as if day and night that mulit coloured fuck grinned at me until I had comepletly broken. I had just lost a friend and realized I could never be with the one whom I longed for. The days cycled and with night came tears that could sweep a lonely sailor away to better lands and with the bright of day came a unusual happiness I had not felt in years. Some of my friends liked the fake me but it was just a facade to maintain myself at least a tiny bit until he returned to me once again. The rats smiled as I lived through my own proverbal hell not out of malice but because they could see who I really was inside, deeply broken and ready to snap if I lost just a tiny fraction of what was keeping me whole. It was a beautiful day when they came calling back to me, as if a siren was calling me ashore they brought themselves back into me. I was whole again, but with their return came my bitterness. I may be complete once again but unlike the past, I will not make the same mistake as to believe this will not happen again.
Life is a big retcon sometimes. Whether it's because some 13 year old using some mystical artifact they have no clue what they're doing with fucking shit up or a passing conversation creating an entire fast food franchise, reality likes to fuck with itself so it makes the most logical coherent sense even if in the moment we do not understand why these things would lead to a cohesive narrative. Most people don't notice these things happen due to them not being resistant to these changes. I personally have witnessesd thousands of these reality changes from something minor like the color of a building changing to something huge like my own college degree going from music production to a degree in thaumaturgy without me noticing sometime between 2007-2009. I still have no clue why reality changed in that way, would have been really nice to have music production to not be my minor...
As someone who worked in the blossoming field of magic technology in the late aughts I have worked on projects involving these animates and had a few of them as co-workers. Despite the sensationalized name they were given, they do not feed off people's emotions but instead get aligned to an emotion while they are an inanimate object. When they become animate they will act in ways to create that same emotion in others. Oftentimes their souls are stored in objects inside of their bodies called Animas but othertimes their soul just encompases their entire form for example, a plush animate is more likely to have a plush heart inside of it than a pool toy who's whole body would be the anima. They are practically the same thing toons are but as with most things with magic, we arbitarily catagorize them so we feel a bit of control over our uncontrollable world.