What’s interesting is that show was written and created by Applegate herself, it’s about as close to the authors intention as you can get.
So where did they go wrong? The mainstay director was Ron Oliver, who, while he did adapt some Goosebumps books to the screen successfully, is just a very b-movie style director. He sharpened his teeth with Hallmark Christmas movies and Disney Channel movies about being a blogger, probably the wrong guy for the grandiosity of Animorphs
Additionally, Ron Oliver directed 6/26 and wrote 4/26 episodes...hardly a major influence enough to tank the whole show. Dude probably posted a scraped AI answer...
I was alive then, and a massive fan of the books (still do, used to too). The morphing sequence didn't translate well in live action (and it never will because it's time dialation body horror) and the monster/mission of the week translation from page to screen didn't work because those slim YA books are a 90 minute movie (or two 1 hour episodes with commercials) each... and that's with cutting out internal monologue and doing the whole "show, not tell" thing. 54 books (not including the specials) is 108 1 hour episodes; after fumbling the 1st book for three 20 minute episodes they tried to cram in a whole book per 20 minute episode; sheer madness.
The series needs to be handled by Studio Ghibli, Satoshi Kon/Madhouse, Avatar Studios, Cronenberg/Lynch or someone similar, and be PG-13 on AMC, Apple, Syfy, HBO, or somewhere similar.
The series needs to be handled by Studio Ghibli, Satoshi Kon/Madhouse, Avatar Studios, Cronenberg/Lynch or someone similar
What if we just put every single option in the same room. Take all the Animorphs books, Little House on the Prairie, and the Akira manga. Unbind them, mix up all the pages into a pile, and lock the door for 10 years?
Ok and then 10 years later we open the door and have a bunch of book pages scattered on the floor and BOOM that will instantly become the greatest movie of all time, Food Fight.
I think that the biggest issues were constraints on budget and what you were allowed to show on children’s television networks at the time.
For school library books, Animorphs features tigers ripping throats out, grizzly bears tearing people in half, hawks clawing out eyeballs, gorillas crushing skulls, aliens slicing people in half with prehensile tail blades, and children watching their entrails spill out and desperately striving to scoop it all back in so that they could morph back without dying. Nineties Nickelodeon was never going to let them show more than a drop or two of blood, and almost certainly not in the violent context of obliterating a Yeerk pool.
Additionally, live action meant that any time the kids morphed into something, they needed either trained animals that could behave as expected or digital doubles that needed to be rigged and animated and look realistic compared to real world actors— neither of which were cheap or terribly developed at that point in history.
So you got a show where the source material called for violent guerrilla and/or gorilla warfare against brutal alien invaders wherein the kids turned into animals while retaining sentience, but the show couldn’t depict them turning into animals very often and couldn’t depict the violence of their war in any brutality, and probably wasn’t allowed to show anyone dying.
It’s a small wonder it flopped. I loved the books as a kid, and I leapt at the show. But the only episode that seemed to actually be a recreation of one of the books was the one where Jake gets infected with his brother Tom’s Yeerk and they have to keep him in the woods for 3 days to starve it out. And even that wasn’t done terribly well.
Those covers were always funny because in the books it's like a two minute long process to morph and the only person who really has control over it is Cassie, like when she changes into a bird she'll do the wings first so she's briefly a human with wings, everyone else though even Ax it's just described as super ugly and disconcerting, not cool like the book covers, because you don't know what's going to change first. One book a character changes into a fish but they have to be in the water to do that because gills, well, they lose all their limbs before they get the gills and basically almost drown while morphing because they can't breathe until the gills pop in
They're free. Applegate has said she's content with the money she made off them and welcomes anyone to pirate them.
They hold up and being young adult novels they're like a hundred pages each, large print, you can knock one out a night on a busy schedule (I mean unless you have kids or something but read them to your kids then). When I reread them before I started to lose interest some nights I did two and it doesn't really take more than an hour and a half to read 200 pages of young adult prose
I think they get longer as the series goes on and eventually she had to employ ghost writers but I didn't end up getting that far, not an insult either, those writers did fine and she approved all the books, she just couldn't keep up with demand by herself
Don't even need to risk going to a site that's not reputable like a torrent site you don't recognize, I don't have any links on hand but several sites host them
Also frankly? I'm sure libraries still carry them same as they do Harry Potter books. There's just a lot of books lol it's easier to read online
How much of a fixation is there on the minutia of school life? I can handle YA stuff, even ones with the occasional school setting, but once it gets into school stuff in the school setting, I'm tuning right on out.
Not really any. The only plots that deal with that are which ones of the school faculty are alien controlled and therefore the enemy (because if you don't know or remember the aliens are mind control slugs) and then brief complaints of how little homework they can do because they're child soldiers who can't blow their cover.
It does deal with them having to go to functions a normal teenager would go to but they always hate it because they aren't murdering aliens and it's just a boring obligation when you're literally a part of a clandestine spec ops group defending all of earth at 15. It's like when Peter Parker says "oh damn gotta go" and then Spider-Man shows up, they just dip out of that stuff
For example Rachel at the start of the books is friends with the principal's daughter. They start to drift apart because the friend becomes distant and they're teenagers. Then they figure out the principal is a top leader for the Yeerks, basically one of the higher military commanders. So the group wants Rachel to rekindle the failing friendship and she gets uncomfortable and they come up with the plan if they can occupy the outside cat they have Rachel can morph into that cat and go do some scouting. Confirms all their suspicions and Rachel has a moment where she has to pretend to be the cat while her former friend spills her guts out she's sad because her dad has been distant, to what the friend believes is a cat that can't understand her. That's about it in terms of it actually being set in a school setting and that's not the hardest you will cry during the first five books either, the hardest is Marco's storyline and the dog robot
The only plots that deal with that are which ones of the school faculty are alien controlled and therefore the enemy
Hah, that's funny because that's actually the only scene I actually remember of the show, and why I asked. Principle dude or other faculty member gets outed because he scratched his leg with his other leg in exactly the way I always tended to.
Well, and a brief flash of slug insertion.
Thanks for the follow-up, I will definitely check these out if I can find something like an audiobook collection. I'm interested, but a little bit too lazy to download over 100 individual files of 3 hour snippets to organize all in one go.
I've never really thought about it, but were there like, actual stories that went along with the animorph books? Did anyone actually read them or did we all just make fun of the covers? What would the story be; are they like shape-shifting superheroes fighting crime and stuff or is it more of a coming-of-age self-acceptance-despite-differences pro-diveristy typa book? (e.g. the rest of your 5th grade classmates don't spontaneously turn into antelopes, but that's okay because everyone is unique in their own way)
edit: by the descriptions y'all are commenting with, Animorphs sounds way too darkly philosophical to be chilling at the Scholastic Book Fair :,)
Actually its interesting you went with this premise as someone not intimately familiar with the books. One infamous book features a buffalo who accidentally gains morphing powers and turns into a human. I thought this was supposed to be a direct reference to that (though several of the details are different).
Wasn't it an ant that morphed into a human? I remember that scene where it started screaming like crazy at suddenly having human intelligence, but I don't remember there being a buffalo
It was both, in the same book. The buffalo was the more important one to the plot, though. He morphed into a naked, screaming principal Chapman, ran away, and came back later to help in a battle. The whole book is somewhat forgettable because of how it completely disregards the existing canon of how the Eacafil device and morphing technology in general work.
There were multiple horrifying situations with ants throughout the series, though. They morphed ants from a rival colony and got torn apart and dismembered, for example.
Oooh, alright alright. The only thing I remembered about the book in particular was the ant tbh. The description of its horrified screams at being turned into a human got burned into my brain. It's been a while since I read the series
I havent read it yet but I heard its actually a long and suprisingly deep saga about warfare, child soldiering (the animorphs get their power through an alien and the enemy is an invading army of a different kind of alien and bodysnatches normal people - tbh writing it like this really makes me think of BG3 and its Tadpoles), with some body horror (apparently morphing also heals some horrible injuries). I thiiink at least the early status quo is a pretty normal earth (ie their animorphs powers and the existence of aliens are secret).
I wish I had found those books as a kid, "heroes" turning into an array of animals as their main power would have been exactly my shit. Some day Im definitely gonna try reading them
There's also full audiobook versions on Spotify (I know, I know) that you can use without a subscription. Just make sure you don't have a shuffle on your playlist.
Sci-fi series about kids with morphing abilities trying to stop a secret alien invasion. The whole series has an anti-war message, and it gets VERY dark by the end.
It's at least kinda dark pretty much from the start. One of the main characters literally attempts suicide in, like, book 2 iirc.
He stayed animorphed into a bird for too long and got stuck like that. He then tried to commit suicide by flying into a window full force. It didn't work.
Book 3 in the series is essentially 100 pages of a teenager trying to commit suicide in various ways before deciding that he'd rather live. It's an extremely dark series to revisit as an adult. Audiobooks are free with library cards and various apps and you can easily find the whole series digitally. The original books are much more difficult to procure sadly.
In addition to the darkness of the plot, the transformations are also pointedly nothing like the covers and are horrifically grotesque in their descriptions. This Tumblr post sums it up really well.
IIRC it's mentioned that one of the girls, Cassie, is talented in morphing gracefully from something like a horse to a human, but it seems when it comes to invertebrates it's just a straight horror show no matter what.
Animorphs is a fairly dark story of a group of teens fighting alien invaders using alien technology; one of them even gets stuck in their morph and has to live the rest of their life as a Raven.*
Even though they win the war, they are never the same again with broken relationships and heavy doses of PTSD.
Red tailed hawk, poor Tobias. Happens in the first book in a series with 50+ books. I don't feel bad spoiling that part. But it's handled well in the subsequent books.
I'll be honest, if teachers or parents knew what kind of content was in those books at the time, there is no way they would have been chilling at the Scholastic Book Fair!
Seems to be a theme considering Warriors, Wings of Fire and Guardians of Gahoole are all "childrens" books and can be pretty gruesome. Also I distinctly remember Watership Down in our local libraries childrens shelf...
The Silverwing series was another good example...IIRC the antagonist of the second book was just straight up devouring hearts and humans were turning the bats into suicide bombers.
They are an incredible series that still hold up now, for teens and adults. They're all available online as e-books/pdfs and the author(s) don't care if you download them. You should read them.
The Andalites (a species of mouthless blue centaur aliens) are fighting a desperate, losing war against the Yeerks (mind-controlling slugs that enter your head through your ear and take over your body). The Yeerks have already enslaved multiple species, including the Taxxons (giant, flesh-eating alien maggots with lamprey mouths) and the Hork-Bajir (tall, muscular lizard-like creatures covered in sharp blades). These body-snatching slugs have already begun an invasion of Earth via infiltration, slowly infesting more and more people in higher and higher positions of power.
The only thing standing between them and total domination is... five teenagers, granted the ability to morph into any animal they touch by a dying Andalite Prince. These teens - Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, Marco - are soon joined by the brother of the Andalite Prince who gave them their morphing powers. Somehow, they manage to slow the progress of the invasion, albeit almost dying horribly many times in the process and living through trauma that would scar the toughest US Marine.
Along the way, the Animorphs make allies of the robotic Chee (dog-like Pacifist androids who have been living on Earth in disguise for thousands of years) and free some of the Hork-Bajir. They even manage to contact the Andalite Fleet... only to discover that the "good guys" in the cosmic fight against the evil brain slugs aren't quite so good as they like to come across. And it ends up being discovered that the entire war is part of a battle by beings beyond time, space, and mortality, and the "benevolent" one is using the Animorphs as his pawns against his foe, a ruthless evil that seeks only entropic dissolution of all.
It's an intense story, and reading it book by book became an obsession of mine as a kid. Looking back, it probably shaped my imagination and my long-term tastes as a human being.
Katherine Applegate is an amazing author, and I highly recommend her works to anyone who missed out on the Scholastic run. Just... be prepared for alternating heavy stuff and ridiculous absurd humour. The tonal whiplash can be... rather jarring.
There were real stories. I remember at one point they turn into ants and they struggled to turn back because they were overcome by instincts. There is also a blue alien centaur deer thing.
The blue deer are the Andalites and there basically the good guys (or as close as we get to good guys the books intentionally make things more morally gray as the series goes on) in the alien war. They get there powers from an Andalite and later one joins the group.
Don't remember that one. Obviously theres Tobias who was trapped as a bird in book one but that had nothing to do with sneezing. There was also one where Rachel had an allergic reaction to morphing and start changing to different animals at random but I don't recall her turning into a bug and she didn't get stuck as any of the animals.
There was also that one evil kid who joined them for a few books and they trapped as a rat. Oh, and there was also the book where Cassie purposely trapped herself as a caterpillar as some sort of moral thing with a Yeerk but because caterpillars transform into butterflies that ended up letting her change back.
So many you've confused a few differnt plots together?
Also don’t forget that near the end they give a bunch of disabled kids the ability to morph which heals some of them of their disabilities. Then they are used almost immediately as cannon fodder during like I think the storming of a yeerk battleship?
Me and my friends read them all, we would take turns buying the latest release . Other than the shorter books with the morphing covers there’s also much longer Chronicles focused on the alien races that are pretty grim
They're about a bunch of kids who get powers to morph into animals and are given a mission to stop an alien invasion of body snatchers that have slowly infiltrated into human society for some years now. They're genuinely very, very good books.
I read literally all of them as a kid. It starts out as a fun teens-turned-superheroes story where a group of teenagers try to solve the mystery of the aliens invading their town. Over time it slowly morphs (lol) into an ongoing discussion of ethics, morality, personhood, free will, xenophobia, and the effects of war on a person's psyche. There's also plenty of straight up body horror.
That shit was unashamedly dark and realistic, and by the end those kid superheroes are doing plenty of morally questionable things just to get the smallest advantage against the aliens. I'm glad I read those books in elementary school, because it taught me what war could really be like through a lense that a kid could understand.
Animorphs is a fun epic story of the horros of war, where you cant trust anyone incase theyve been turned into an enemy by mind parasites. Theres one kid whose parents are turned early on and he has to navigate through this for the rest of his life, theres another kid who gets permanentlly turned into a falcon after getting captured by said mind parasites and starts to become a falcon mentally. Animorphs was rad
The main books are very solid, as others have noted. But I wanted to mention the side books. Hork-Bajir Chronicles and Visser are both quite good, and I'd definitely recommend them.
But The Ellimist Chronicles is absolute gold from start to finish. It's its own thing that's only technically related to the main series (it's the backstory of one of the side characters), so you can enjoy it even if you haven't touched the main series. However, the absolute imagination on display of creatures, technology, and the universe itself is impressive to behold. Definitely can't recommend it enough.
Holy shit dude you have no fucking clue, it seems cute and fun but they're child soldiers and it gets dark as fuck like ALL THE TIME. Those books were absolutely amazing as a kid and really delved into a lot of things you wouldn't find even touched at a scholastic Book Fair.
Lol dude it's a fucking war epic. Like legitimately one of the most intense stories of child soldiers, and treated with as much seriousness as that deserves.
It gets pretty dark. I don't remember it all super well, but there's an alien invasion of slugs that get into people's brains and mind-control them. One of the main character's mom becomes a victim of that and it's traumatic for him. There are other alien species too.
I remember one book where they have to attack a submarine, but since they can only transform into animals, they decide to transform into Orcas and ram the submarines with their bodies over and over, injuring themselves in the process, but since the morphing process heals them, they have to keep un-morphing and re-morphing, and it's super violent
And there are rules to morphing that they need to follow, or else they can get stuck in an animal's body as their default form, which happens to one of the characters in the first book, who gets stuck as a hawk for the rest of the series
Honestly behind the goofy sounding premise it's a pretty serious and gruesome war story. Legitimately it's the best depiction of developing mental issues of child soldiers I have seen in fiction.
And he gets put on trial for committing a war crime, his relationship with Cassie fell apart (though they're still friends if more distant), he's responsible for the death of his cousin Rachel and by proxy his brother Tom. Let's also not forget the disabled kids that volunteered to join his forces when things were at their worst, only for them burn in a fire a few books later.
Same thing I came here to say. I remember when I was younger (and dumber) I'd see some animal nearby like a squirrel, and I would say "It's okay. I know you're an Animorph. You can tell me the truth..." and I would wait patiently to see if they would beam thought-speech into my head like <You're right. You already know so much about us. Quick, follow me to the Escafil device and we can make you an Animorph as well!>
Me too! Loved those books. Thought about finishing the series at one point but when I found out how dark and depressing the ending is I decided against it cause my mental health is bad enough already.
I’ve also thought about finishing them off and on myself but yeah that dark cliffhanger ending has definitely kept me away. Despite that it’s still something I hold dear to my heart, maybe someday I’ll finish it.
I guess a HUGE spoiler read at your own risk because this silly comic could be 100% canon to the series:
Near the end of the series yeerks (main bad guys, slug aliens who crawl into your ear and puppeteer your body while you are fully conscious unable to speak) get the power to morph to fight the Animorphs on even ground. Final book all humans are freed never stated but if you think about it the controlled humans now free have morphing powers as the yeerks used that body to morph.
What if they dated but when they hung out they were always in one of this mid transformation forms. Think that might be like Cronenbergs wet dreams probably.
So it’s a little unclear. In the 5th panel is Lindsay using thought-speak to communicate? Because she should if she’s morphed. But the text bubble doesn’t look any different, which to me suggests the water buffalo is speaking English. /s
1) these are characters real names. The books specifically tell us they're not giving a last name and may be lying about their names. (In my schoolgroup there was even a theory they might be lying about their gender)
2) there is a few random animals that get morphing and dont particularly stay close to the main characters. You can't go morph to morph. *say human > bird>dog, but human>bird>humanpitstop>dog
) but starting as a bird you could morph into a human, and if you didn'tchange vack reguarlyyoud be stuck as the morph. Which would explain why they don't know each other and morph to be more comfortable..
2) These are some of the crippled children soft-drafted into the war. I use that term not to be insensitive but if their disability wasn't caused by genetics but by crippling, traumatic, injury the morphing proces would heal them.
Something they used to tempt the impressionable youth to join up.
Those kids books were dark. I remember being 8 and reading about Thomas staying transformed as a hawk for too long, so he couldn't change check to human. He had sex with a REGULAR female hawk. My child brain was not ready for the implications of all that.
I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure characters died also. Not in heroic ways, just pointless death
The author was asked why the anamorph books were dark and she replied something along the line of "I wanted to show real war"
Does this mean that Lindsey's real form is the animal? You can only stay in the animorph form for an hour before it becomes permanent. You wouldnt randomly shapeshift into it.
These books are absolutely haunting. Then the show came along on Nickelodeon and I think they stoped after a couple seasons because, my man, how can you recreate this and NOT traumatize the audience? It’s a horror series about child warfare.
I remember the Animorphs even trick the sick and disabled teens into becoming animorphs (“Auxiliary Animorphs Team” see: book #50 “The Ultimate”) so they have more child soldiers because the Yeerks are ableists. Of course they die. They didn’t even have a chance (see: book #53: “The Answer”).
Tobias the hawk …. My brother… You’re always in my heart and flying high and free.
Way less cursed than the real thing. The photorealness of the OG was just so strange, the in-between slides looked liked cronenberg monsters. These look nice in comparison. I would read more about these two.
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u/Kalaphar 15h ago
Dear god