How To: Character transforms into water and back (fluids? particles?)

I would like to create an effect in Blender where a character mesh I have would:

  1. Become water (or rather, start the animation with water shaped like the character)
  2. Drop into the ground and collapse into a cylinder (I guess a bit like a genie would be ‘sucked’ into his lamp, although in this case it would be sucked into the lamp shape, which wouldn’t exist before)

The closest thing I could find was “Blender Magic Fluid Simulation” (can’t post youtube link since I’m new user), but it was just demonstration, and even that isn’t fully what I need.

I tried playing a lot with both fluids and particles, controls, and even the molecular addon, and I’m just not sure on how I can do such a thing.

Any ideas?