Between 1996 and 2001, a series of books were released that sold millions of copies, spawned a TV adaptation, video games, and countless merchandise. The series had an enormous impact on me and millions of other preteens, due in no small part to it being funny and action-packed but also surprisingly deep, vaguely educational and emotionally engaging (if by engaging, you mean ‘gripped you in an emotional chokehold and wouldn’t let go until you were sobbing and broken).
The series was Animorphs, written by KA Applegate, with support from her husband Michael Grant and a small army of ghostwriters who helped deliver the 54 book core series against a demanding release schedule as the series’ popularity soared. This last week has seen the announcement that Animorphs will be adapted for film. As a devoted fan, I of course believe this is wonderful news. Anything that introduces something you love to new people is almost always a good thing. The nature of the series and the hurdles of adaptation do however give me pause to think about a number of challenges and questions that I hope the creative team behind the adaptation are asking themselves and I wanted to explore some of them here.
As with adapting any text into another medium, the adapter needs to consider what is immutable or ‘sacred’ about it and what must be changed to ensure it succeeds in its new form. Much as the Animorphs needed to carefully consider what animal would best help them succeed in their mission, they can’t all just morph polar bears for maximum firepower and assume things will work out fine (sorry Rachel). The most faithful adaptation is rarely the most successful. Books and films are different media, with their rules as to what will work and what will not. Slavish adherence to the source material is unlikely to result in something that works on screen.
Of course, there’s a lot of basic information we don’t yet know about the film that would influence a lot of what the filmmakers will want or be able to do. What is the budget? What is the release platform? Who are they aiming it at? Will it be a stand alone film or the first in a series?
I am of course speculating wildly, but my assumption would be that they will make a film that will stand alone as a coherent piece of work with a view to creating a series of films if it is financially successful. Given that the source material is a series of 54 short novels (plus various subsidiary volumes), a TV series of 20-30 minute episodes would perhaps have been a more natural fit for the story, however if a movie is what we’re getting, we have to hope or assume the narrative will be changed accordingly to best suit the medium. Whilst the lore and backstory of Animorphs is rich, complex and interwoven, it would be surprising if the film went in at the deep end with this stuff, despite many fans presumably hoping for this (in short, I don’t think The Hork-Bajir Chronicles will influence the adaptation very much). Whilst we are living in a post-Marvel Cinematic Universe world, where casual, mainstream audiences are expected to have a working knowledge of dozens of characters, their backstories and origins in order to properly appreciate an increasingly complicated and growing number of films, I regrettably acknowledge that Animorphs does not have the cultural cache and presumably won’t have the necessary budget to create anything on the scale of the MCU. So we can probably dial down expectations accordingly.
The main reason for this is that whilst Animorphs was sensationally popular during its heyday, it has not enjoyed generational success to anywhere near the same extent as Harry Potter or other popular young adult/children’s series. Reissues of the books have been middingly successful at best and the shelves in the children’s sections of Waterstones or local libraries remain sadly free of Animorphs books (at least here in the UK). It’s hard to say why this might be - perhaps its 1990s setting (which we will return to) roots it too much in a time and place that subsequent generations of readers find it more difficult to relate to.
This brings us to a fundamental question the filmmakers need to ask themselves: who is an Animorphs movie for? The series was aimed at the pre-teen market, but as it hasn’t remained popular with subsequent generations. Most of the people that would still think of themselves as fans are in their late twenties to mid thirties. In my opinion, it would be foolish to pander to an older audience too much - for one thing, we’re a very niche market! Absolutely there should be titbits (or Easter eggs, if you prefer) for the faithful, but to have any chance of mainstream and therefore financial success, it needs to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. That means families and it means people that have never previously heard of Animorphs. It literally can’t just be fan service, it can’t be written assuming an encyclopedic level of prior knowledge, it has to be accessible and appropriate for a large audience. I would anticipate them aiming for a 12A/PG-13 certification at a push.
Which brings with it its own problems. Whilst the books were certainly aimed at preteens, it is my belief that whoever okayed them at Scholastic must never have actually read one, because they are hyper-violent and incredibly traumatic. Countless beings are killed, enslaved, tortured, cannibalised and maimed and our protagonists have to deal with impossible moral choices in which they are exposed to the true nature of war and PTSD. Good people are forced to do terrible things. Indeed, the series handles this weighty content incredibly well, but I doubt much of that will survive intact in a film that will surely hope for a broad, mainstream release, or it seems unlikely in a first film at least.
Delving deeper, we have to consider what elements of the series need to remain in order for the movie to recognisably be Animorphs and what could or should be changed. In my opinion, the three key elements to retain should (perhaps obviously) be the basic plot, the core characters and the relationships between them, and the tone of the series.
Firstly the plot; for anyone that needs a reminder, Animorphs is the story of 5 teenagers that learn that the earth is being secretly invaded by a species of alien called the Yeerks. Yeerks enter people’s brains and control them like puppets. The Yeerks are at war with the Andalites and Elfangor, a member of this race of advanced, centaur-like beings, gives the teens the power to morph into any animal they can touch, shortly before being killed by the series’ antagonist, Visser Three. Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie and Marco use their powers to stage a guerilla war against the Yeerks. They are soon joined by Elfangor’s younger brother, Ax. I think to remove any of these basic elements would fundamentally change what Animorphs is about. It’s a sci-fi saga and I think you have to fully embrace this.
The characters and their interpersonal dynamics are absolutely at the heart of what makes the series work and seeing these characters change (literally, metaphorically) and grow is a big reason why fans remain so dedicated. Each of the books is told from a different character’s perspective and offers different views on a given scenario. As a teenager, you might connect with the weight of responsibility and desire to save his family that Jake feels, the loneliness and body dismorphia of Tobias, the conflict between pacifism and necessary evil that Cassie explores, Marco’s desire to find the humour in the worst situations, Rachel’s inner turmoil not to become the evil they are fighting or Ax’s sense of otherness and divided loyalties. The characters may be tweaked and changed, but their motivations and relationships towards each other are what the series is built on.
Finally, the tone is very important. I think it should be made clear that despite its darkness, Animorphs can be very, very funny and a sharp script is a must. It celebrates elements of teen/coming of age stories too - as well as fighting a secret alien invasion, the team also have to deal with divorce, school, love, shopping, video games, etc. Not only does this make the characters real and relatable, it reminds us that they are still children, learning as much about the real world as they fight to save it. Above all though, Animorphs is a war story in which both heroes and villains do terrible things and very few people get a happy ending. Whilst this film is unlikely to reach a place where it can conclude in the same manner as the books, the tone needs to reflect that this is a place it will go.
It’s not an especially popular or well-received film, but in 2010, an adaptation of John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began was released and I feel an Animorphs movie could take some influence from it. It too is the story of a group of teenage guerilla warriors (Australian kids fighting a terrestrial invasion) and I felt the film balanced the ‘teen movie’’ and ‘war movie’ dynamic well.
I would argue that changes to many aspects of the series are necessary for coherence and to work through a visual medium. Firstly, I don’t think that we as fans should be picky about the order or omission of events. It wouldn’t adversely affect anything if Ax joins the group from the beginning (perhaps he’s onboard Elfangor’s spaceship), for example. There are 54 books and not everything will or should be adapted for the screen. I doubt a standalone film would bother to include the Ellimist, a god-like being that subtly orchestrates events from afar - and the various Magic School Bus trips to Australia or the Amazon are probably not essential to the plot. If it helps, I think the series should be remixed, rather than covered.
One topic of much discussion is the characters’ ages. It is revealed in the final book that the kids have been fighting the war for 3 years, starting when they were just 13. I do not think I am alone in assuming they were slightly older than that as I was reading the books and there are pros and cons to remaining faithful to this plot point. On the one hand, the horrors of war that the Animorphs experience are heightened due to their youth. On the other, 13 really is very young from both an ‘in-universe’ and real life perspective; whilst obviously suspension of disbelief is necessary, I think adding just a bit more maturity to the characters would work better on screen. Jake essentially becomes a strategic military genius by the end of the series which works on the page as we spend time in his head with his thoughts over hundreds of pages, but I am not sure I would buy this so easily on screen. This is just one example of where aging up the character just a few years would be more believable. On a more practical level, they would need to identify some very capable child actors if they were to go with them cast being 13. That’s not impossible - the kids from Stranger Things were around that age in the first series and they were all very good - but I think considering older teens would give the producers more options.
Another major aspect of the book series is that each story is told by a different member of the team on rotation. The first book is narrated by Jake, the second by Rachel, the third by Tobias and so on. If the film is to cover anything beyond the first book, then the film needs to treat its cast as a true ensemble, giving everyone a fair share of screen time to allow us to get to know their characters both individually and as part of the team.
Another element of the series that has been debated is the time setting. The books were set contemporaneously in the 1990s and this definitely adds to the nostalgic charm when we revisit them. Personally, I would not be precious about retaining this though; again, the film should be aiming for mainstream appeal and I think children today would enjoy it more being set in the present. You could argue that Stranger Things has been perfectly successful being set in the 80s, but Stranger Things isn’t really aimed at a typical family audience. A plot-based argument against a modern setting is that a large part of the Animorph’s activities were keeping their identities and the fact that they were human children rather than Andalite warriors a secret, which would be harder to do now everyone has an HD video recorder connected to the internet in their pockets. To be honest, I think this would add an extra dimension to the plot; it’s not as if Applegate would have decided to set the series 25 years ago if she only sat down to write it today. Good writers will be able to write around these challenges.
Lastly, and whilst it may seem a little trivial, I think it is worth addressing the level of violence in the series. Whilst you can ‘get away’ with quite a lot at 12A/PG-13 level, I doubt any censor would pass the level of gore and body horror as seen in the books on screen. Again, in search of a wide audience, I think this will need to be toned down, but there are considerations to be made - I understand that animal on alien violence is probably more acceptable than human on human and even making the alien blood any colour other than red would probably help. I would hope that the film implies violence rather than shows it explicitly, perhaps save for some key moments.
So what would an Animorphs film look like if I were in control?
Well firstly, I hope that the presence of Applegate and Grant are enough to allow a basic level of quality control. The books were adapted by Nickelodeon as a series, but even as a kid, I recognised that they hadn’t spent nearly enough money on the project and felt bad that this was how my friends were being introduced to something I held very dear. Hopefully lessons were learned! I have no experience or right to be making these calls and as long as it is made with love, I will be grateful for what we get, good or bad. With that out of the way…
I would make the plot broadly follow the action of the first book. This sees the kids discover Elfangor, learn of the invasion, gain their power, test their new abilities and make an attack on the hidden enemy base, the subterranean Yeerk Pool. We also learn that Jake’s older brother has been taken by the Yeerks, as well as the children’s headteacher, Chapman.
The following few books in the series are plotted around giving each member of the team a personal motivation to fight and I think it would be possible to incorporate these elements into the plot of the first book. Jake’s motivation is to save his brother, which is part and parcel of the story anyway. Rachel is friends with Chapman’s daughter and learns her parents were voluntary slaves to protect her. She also enjoys her new power more so than the others. As both the first two books include spying on Chapman, I think it would be easy to combine this into the film.
At the end of the first book, Tobias is trapped in the body of a hawk. He wrestles with his sense of identity throughout the series. He makes an emotional connection with Elfangor and uses the war to escape his abusive homelife. Again, that could easily be added to the story. In book 4, the team find and rescue Ax, who informs them that the Yeerks will not just enslave the humans, but also destroy the environment, giving nature-loving Cassie her motivation. Ax in turn is also motivated by the need to avenge his brother. I would have Ax arrive on earth uninjured with Elfangor from the beginning and he can witness his brother’s death for himself and inform Cassie of the impending destruction from the start.
Finally, Marco is truly motivated to fight in book 5, where he learns that his mother is not dead, as was previously believed, but in fact one of the highest ranking Yeerks of all, Visser One. The Animorphs learn this aboard the Yeerk mothership on one of their semi-regular trips into space, but there’s no reason why this couldn’t be added into the climatic (but ultimately failed) attack on the Yeerk Pool.
Combining elements of these first few stories would firstly make it a true ensemble film and make the story more efficient and cohesive - there’s no way they’ll adapt 54 books + the subsidiary novels, so some compaction is necessary.
I would also hire David Kronenberg to direct and do as much of the morphing with practical effects as possible, because honestly, if you make a film about humans habitually transforming into animals, not asking Kronenberg would be insulting to his life’s work.
Animorphs is a wonderful series and I genuinely think it has a lot to offer modern audiences. Many of its themes feel even more prescient than when they were first written and the series boasted a diverse, inclusive cast well before this became commonplace (that’s not to say there isn’t more distance to travel - an openly LGBTQ+ character could be incredibly inspiring for questioning young people). As mentioned, my only hopes are that the film is made with love and perhaps most importantly, that it isn’t made for me. I’m a 31 year old guy who has already gotten more out of Animorphs than an adaptation could reasonably expect to emulate. Animorphs deserves to be loved by many millions of new people and I welcome the filmmakers making whatever decisions they need to in order to do that. Let’s do it!
The series was Animorphs, written by KA Applegate, with support from her husband Michael Grant and a small army of ghostwriters who helped deliver the 54 book core series against a demanding release schedule as the series’ popularity soared. This last week has seen the announcement that Animorphs will be adapted for film. As a devoted fan, I of course believe this is wonderful news. Anything that introduces something you love to new people is almost always a good thing. The nature of the series and the hurdles of adaptation do however give me pause to think about a number of challenges and questions that I hope the creative team behind the adaptation are asking themselves and I wanted to explore some of them here.
As with adapting any text into another medium, the adapter needs to consider what is immutable or ‘sacred’ about it and what must be changed to ensure it succeeds in its new form. Much as the Animorphs needed to carefully consider what animal would best help them succeed in their mission, they can’t all just morph polar bears for maximum firepower and assume things will work out fine (sorry Rachel). The most faithful adaptation is rarely the most successful. Books and films are different media, with their rules as to what will work and what will not. Slavish adherence to the source material is unlikely to result in something that works on screen.
Of course, there’s a lot of basic information we don’t yet know about the film that would influence a lot of what the filmmakers will want or be able to do. What is the budget? What is the release platform? Who are they aiming it at? Will it be a stand alone film or the first in a series?
I am of course speculating wildly, but my assumption would be that they will make a film that will stand alone as a coherent piece of work with a view to creating a series of films if it is financially successful. Given that the source material is a series of 54 short novels (plus various subsidiary volumes), a TV series of 20-30 minute episodes would perhaps have been a more natural fit for the story, however if a movie is what we’re getting, we have to hope or assume the narrative will be changed accordingly to best suit the medium. Whilst the lore and backstory of Animorphs is rich, complex and interwoven, it would be surprising if the film went in at the deep end with this stuff, despite many fans presumably hoping for this (in short, I don’t think The Hork-Bajir Chronicles will influence the adaptation very much). Whilst we are living in a post-Marvel Cinematic Universe world, where casual, mainstream audiences are expected to have a working knowledge of dozens of characters, their backstories and origins in order to properly appreciate an increasingly complicated and growing number of films, I regrettably acknowledge that Animorphs does not have the cultural cache and presumably won’t have the necessary budget to create anything on the scale of the MCU. So we can probably dial down expectations accordingly.
The main reason for this is that whilst Animorphs was sensationally popular during its heyday, it has not enjoyed generational success to anywhere near the same extent as Harry Potter or other popular young adult/children’s series. Reissues of the books have been middingly successful at best and the shelves in the children’s sections of Waterstones or local libraries remain sadly free of Animorphs books (at least here in the UK). It’s hard to say why this might be - perhaps its 1990s setting (which we will return to) roots it too much in a time and place that subsequent generations of readers find it more difficult to relate to.
This brings us to a fundamental question the filmmakers need to ask themselves: who is an Animorphs movie for? The series was aimed at the pre-teen market, but as it hasn’t remained popular with subsequent generations. Most of the people that would still think of themselves as fans are in their late twenties to mid thirties. In my opinion, it would be foolish to pander to an older audience too much - for one thing, we’re a very niche market! Absolutely there should be titbits (or Easter eggs, if you prefer) for the faithful, but to have any chance of mainstream and therefore financial success, it needs to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. That means families and it means people that have never previously heard of Animorphs. It literally can’t just be fan service, it can’t be written assuming an encyclopedic level of prior knowledge, it has to be accessible and appropriate for a large audience. I would anticipate them aiming for a 12A/PG-13 certification at a push.
Which brings with it its own problems. Whilst the books were certainly aimed at preteens, it is my belief that whoever okayed them at Scholastic must never have actually read one, because they are hyper-violent and incredibly traumatic. Countless beings are killed, enslaved, tortured, cannibalised and maimed and our protagonists have to deal with impossible moral choices in which they are exposed to the true nature of war and PTSD. Good people are forced to do terrible things. Indeed, the series handles this weighty content incredibly well, but I doubt much of that will survive intact in a film that will surely hope for a broad, mainstream release, or it seems unlikely in a first film at least.
Delving deeper, we have to consider what elements of the series need to remain in order for the movie to recognisably be Animorphs and what could or should be changed. In my opinion, the three key elements to retain should (perhaps obviously) be the basic plot, the core characters and the relationships between them, and the tone of the series.
Firstly the plot; for anyone that needs a reminder, Animorphs is the story of 5 teenagers that learn that the earth is being secretly invaded by a species of alien called the Yeerks. Yeerks enter people’s brains and control them like puppets. The Yeerks are at war with the Andalites and Elfangor, a member of this race of advanced, centaur-like beings, gives the teens the power to morph into any animal they can touch, shortly before being killed by the series’ antagonist, Visser Three. Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie and Marco use their powers to stage a guerilla war against the Yeerks. They are soon joined by Elfangor’s younger brother, Ax. I think to remove any of these basic elements would fundamentally change what Animorphs is about. It’s a sci-fi saga and I think you have to fully embrace this.
The characters and their interpersonal dynamics are absolutely at the heart of what makes the series work and seeing these characters change (literally, metaphorically) and grow is a big reason why fans remain so dedicated. Each of the books is told from a different character’s perspective and offers different views on a given scenario. As a teenager, you might connect with the weight of responsibility and desire to save his family that Jake feels, the loneliness and body dismorphia of Tobias, the conflict between pacifism and necessary evil that Cassie explores, Marco’s desire to find the humour in the worst situations, Rachel’s inner turmoil not to become the evil they are fighting or Ax’s sense of otherness and divided loyalties. The characters may be tweaked and changed, but their motivations and relationships towards each other are what the series is built on.
Finally, the tone is very important. I think it should be made clear that despite its darkness, Animorphs can be very, very funny and a sharp script is a must. It celebrates elements of teen/coming of age stories too - as well as fighting a secret alien invasion, the team also have to deal with divorce, school, love, shopping, video games, etc. Not only does this make the characters real and relatable, it reminds us that they are still children, learning as much about the real world as they fight to save it. Above all though, Animorphs is a war story in which both heroes and villains do terrible things and very few people get a happy ending. Whilst this film is unlikely to reach a place where it can conclude in the same manner as the books, the tone needs to reflect that this is a place it will go.
It’s not an especially popular or well-received film, but in 2010, an adaptation of John Marsden’s Tomorrow, When the War Began was released and I feel an Animorphs movie could take some influence from it. It too is the story of a group of teenage guerilla warriors (Australian kids fighting a terrestrial invasion) and I felt the film balanced the ‘teen movie’’ and ‘war movie’ dynamic well.
I would argue that changes to many aspects of the series are necessary for coherence and to work through a visual medium. Firstly, I don’t think that we as fans should be picky about the order or omission of events. It wouldn’t adversely affect anything if Ax joins the group from the beginning (perhaps he’s onboard Elfangor’s spaceship), for example. There are 54 books and not everything will or should be adapted for the screen. I doubt a standalone film would bother to include the Ellimist, a god-like being that subtly orchestrates events from afar - and the various Magic School Bus trips to Australia or the Amazon are probably not essential to the plot. If it helps, I think the series should be remixed, rather than covered.
One topic of much discussion is the characters’ ages. It is revealed in the final book that the kids have been fighting the war for 3 years, starting when they were just 13. I do not think I am alone in assuming they were slightly older than that as I was reading the books and there are pros and cons to remaining faithful to this plot point. On the one hand, the horrors of war that the Animorphs experience are heightened due to their youth. On the other, 13 really is very young from both an ‘in-universe’ and real life perspective; whilst obviously suspension of disbelief is necessary, I think adding just a bit more maturity to the characters would work better on screen. Jake essentially becomes a strategic military genius by the end of the series which works on the page as we spend time in his head with his thoughts over hundreds of pages, but I am not sure I would buy this so easily on screen. This is just one example of where aging up the character just a few years would be more believable. On a more practical level, they would need to identify some very capable child actors if they were to go with them cast being 13. That’s not impossible - the kids from Stranger Things were around that age in the first series and they were all very good - but I think considering older teens would give the producers more options.
Another major aspect of the book series is that each story is told by a different member of the team on rotation. The first book is narrated by Jake, the second by Rachel, the third by Tobias and so on. If the film is to cover anything beyond the first book, then the film needs to treat its cast as a true ensemble, giving everyone a fair share of screen time to allow us to get to know their characters both individually and as part of the team.
Another element of the series that has been debated is the time setting. The books were set contemporaneously in the 1990s and this definitely adds to the nostalgic charm when we revisit them. Personally, I would not be precious about retaining this though; again, the film should be aiming for mainstream appeal and I think children today would enjoy it more being set in the present. You could argue that Stranger Things has been perfectly successful being set in the 80s, but Stranger Things isn’t really aimed at a typical family audience. A plot-based argument against a modern setting is that a large part of the Animorph’s activities were keeping their identities and the fact that they were human children rather than Andalite warriors a secret, which would be harder to do now everyone has an HD video recorder connected to the internet in their pockets. To be honest, I think this would add an extra dimension to the plot; it’s not as if Applegate would have decided to set the series 25 years ago if she only sat down to write it today. Good writers will be able to write around these challenges.
Lastly, and whilst it may seem a little trivial, I think it is worth addressing the level of violence in the series. Whilst you can ‘get away’ with quite a lot at 12A/PG-13 level, I doubt any censor would pass the level of gore and body horror as seen in the books on screen. Again, in search of a wide audience, I think this will need to be toned down, but there are considerations to be made - I understand that animal on alien violence is probably more acceptable than human on human and even making the alien blood any colour other than red would probably help. I would hope that the film implies violence rather than shows it explicitly, perhaps save for some key moments.
So what would an Animorphs film look like if I were in control?
Well firstly, I hope that the presence of Applegate and Grant are enough to allow a basic level of quality control. The books were adapted by Nickelodeon as a series, but even as a kid, I recognised that they hadn’t spent nearly enough money on the project and felt bad that this was how my friends were being introduced to something I held very dear. Hopefully lessons were learned! I have no experience or right to be making these calls and as long as it is made with love, I will be grateful for what we get, good or bad. With that out of the way…
I would make the plot broadly follow the action of the first book. This sees the kids discover Elfangor, learn of the invasion, gain their power, test their new abilities and make an attack on the hidden enemy base, the subterranean Yeerk Pool. We also learn that Jake’s older brother has been taken by the Yeerks, as well as the children’s headteacher, Chapman.
The following few books in the series are plotted around giving each member of the team a personal motivation to fight and I think it would be possible to incorporate these elements into the plot of the first book. Jake’s motivation is to save his brother, which is part and parcel of the story anyway. Rachel is friends with Chapman’s daughter and learns her parents were voluntary slaves to protect her. She also enjoys her new power more so than the others. As both the first two books include spying on Chapman, I think it would be easy to combine this into the film.
At the end of the first book, Tobias is trapped in the body of a hawk. He wrestles with his sense of identity throughout the series. He makes an emotional connection with Elfangor and uses the war to escape his abusive homelife. Again, that could easily be added to the story. In book 4, the team find and rescue Ax, who informs them that the Yeerks will not just enslave the humans, but also destroy the environment, giving nature-loving Cassie her motivation. Ax in turn is also motivated by the need to avenge his brother. I would have Ax arrive on earth uninjured with Elfangor from the beginning and he can witness his brother’s death for himself and inform Cassie of the impending destruction from the start.
Finally, Marco is truly motivated to fight in book 5, where he learns that his mother is not dead, as was previously believed, but in fact one of the highest ranking Yeerks of all, Visser One. The Animorphs learn this aboard the Yeerk mothership on one of their semi-regular trips into space, but there’s no reason why this couldn’t be added into the climatic (but ultimately failed) attack on the Yeerk Pool.
Combining elements of these first few stories would firstly make it a true ensemble film and make the story more efficient and cohesive - there’s no way they’ll adapt 54 books + the subsidiary novels, so some compaction is necessary.
I would also hire David Kronenberg to direct and do as much of the morphing with practical effects as possible, because honestly, if you make a film about humans habitually transforming into animals, not asking Kronenberg would be insulting to his life’s work.
Animorphs is a wonderful series and I genuinely think it has a lot to offer modern audiences. Many of its themes feel even more prescient than when they were first written and the series boasted a diverse, inclusive cast well before this became commonplace (that’s not to say there isn’t more distance to travel - an openly LGBTQ+ character could be incredibly inspiring for questioning young people). As mentioned, my only hopes are that the film is made with love and perhaps most importantly, that it isn’t made for me. I’m a 31 year old guy who has already gotten more out of Animorphs than an adaptation could reasonably expect to emulate. Animorphs deserves to be loved by many millions of new people and I welcome the filmmakers making whatever decisions they need to in order to do that. Let’s do it!
Comments
Post a Comment