Twilight Princess Style Mesh Dissolve?

I'm currently working on a project that requires characters to be essentially dissolved into component planes or triangles and then warped away - similar to this effect found in Twilight Princess: https://youtu.be/VedvvnhFffk?t=50s I believe in Twilight Princess they're using a well timed top-down dissolve surface shader with a particle system at the same time. I am hoping to do a 'real' version of this effect that would effectively allow me to reverse the process as well in real time.

I am a bit new to shaders though have some experience, are there vertex shader methods that could 'break off' tris and move them as the mesh 'dissolves' in this fashion? Thanks!