Animorphs

I remembered reading the books I've read when I was a kid and I think I took a view of the episodes of the TV show it was based on, but there are quite some flaws with this film including the part where Tobias revealed that he's the last to morph where as in the book series, he is the first to morph and the part where the Animorphs meet at Cassie's barn after their first alien encounter, they tried out their morphing abilities with Tobias as a hawk. Rachel's animal form was a cat while in the book her animal form was an African elephant, although in this show, she also acquires a lion form and Marco's animal form was a brown rat whilst in the book he never acquired that form.

With the flaws out of the way, there are some good stuff about this show. The acting is great. Shawn Rushmore did great, Brooke Nevin was good, and the rest were terrific. The action for this show is pretty amazing. The special effects aren't that bad including the morphing sequences with our characters and the music (including the theme song) was pretty decent.

Although, not a classic from the late 90s, Animorphs is still a watchable show if fans of the book series could get over it's flaws.

The animorphs series of books was truly excellent. It was my primary source of reading material for five years. One afternoon, however, having seen an ad in one of the books for an animorphs television series, I sat down to watch what is quite possibly the greatest abomination in the entire realm of book to screen conversions. What would have been ideal was a series that stuck directly to the books, with one hour episodes. The books are short enough that each one could be covered in one or two episodes. Movies such as stand by me are an excellent example of how a story can be converted almost verbatim into a script. even a cartoon could have done the job well.Instead, we have a truly disgraceful effort.

The actors selected to represent the animorphs are FAR too old. the animorphs were 13 years old at the beginning of the novels, and yet adults were chosen to play them. 13 or 14 year olds would have been much better.

Furthermore, the plot bears little resemblance to the books, even going so far as to change fundamental elements. What on earth was this stupid 'disk' they were running around with on the first few episodes? All in all, very poorly done. 1/10

Watched some of it when it first came out. Re-watching it now after re-reading the book series, it's pretty incredible how bad the first few episodes are. Then it's pretty incredible how some of the later episodes are actually genuinely good, and much more accurate to the books than I remember.

Budget concerns force certain things, like Visser Three and Ax being in human morph a lot, or the lack of certain characteristic battle morphs like gorilla, elephant, grizzly bear.

Most of the young actors get better over time but the clear and obvious standout is Paulo Costanzo as Ax. The only other thing i've seen him in is The Expanse. He clearly understands his role better than a lot of the others.

In the strange and foggy No Man's Land of children's literature betwixt R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series and J.K. Rowling's phenomenal Harry Potter novels, K.A. Applegate reigned supreme. Pound for pound, I daresay Animorphs was every bit as intriguing (and probably better written) than Harry Potter, and leaps and bounds more mature than Goosebumps; and while the series developed problems after a few years (an over complicated, meandering mythology, inferior ghostwriting), I contend that the first spate of books are masterpieces in their own right, leveling an often profound gaze at the effects of war and savagery on formerly untroubled minds.

When I, a fresh-faced young lad of 11, first learned that a television show was in the works to bring my favorite books to life on the small screen, I was elated. I admit my heart sank a bit when I heard it was to be produced by Nickelodeon, who by the late '90s had shifted their focus from the preteen and teen market to a demographic exclusively in the 8-12 range; but realistically, what other network would air such an adaptation? The books were too violent and dark to air on a children's network, but no adult was going to watch a show about high school students turning into animals and fighting aliens. Perhaps it could have worked on the WB, following the success of high-school themed shows like Buffy, but alas, that was not the way things worked out.

Apart from the censorship, the biggest problem a Nickelodeon adaptation would run into was budgetary. The books played out on a grand scale, every installation featuring aliens, spaceships, guerrilla warfare, shapeshifting, and occasionally, entirely different planets. Those elements were either scaled back or dropped entirely for the television series. The alien prosthetics were unconvincing, Applegate's concepts being much more ambitious than the average "wrinkly forehead" aliens featured on the average Star Trek episode. I remember my disappointment at the introduction of Elfangor and the Hork Bajir in the pilot episode. They were underwhelming, to say the least.

When I discovered the show was available on Netflix, I watched it on a whim, in the background, with all the preconceptions of my high expectations dissipated in the course of time. The first few episodes are still pretty abysmal, with lackluster writing and facile direction. There just wasn't enough money or creative freedom to accomplish what Applegate did in the books.

As the series progresses, however, it comes into its own, crafting an identity as its own entity separate from the prose. The characters become more three-dimensional on their own terms; the acting improves; the budgetary limitations are circumvented. True, sometimes (oftentimes) the villains are incredibly stupid and the action sequences don't hold up all that well; the psychological and physical effects of a full-fledged war are neutered by the network mandate to remain "kid-friendly", which means no death or serious trauma can ever really befall the characters. But the basic human interaction, the relationships, improve, and the storytelling finds firmer footing. If you allow yourself to forget the source material, Animorphs stands as a worthy piece of family entertainment.

It's also fun to see a "before-they-were-famous" Shawn Ashmore and Paulo Costanzo, who have since achieved mainstream success via the X-Men franchise and the popular USA comedy/drama "Royal Pains", respectively. Maybe this is through glasses tinted with hindsight, but they are easily the strongest members of the cast (and I'm including the adults in that), with Ashmore growing into his own as conflicted "I didn't ask for this" leader Jake, and Costanzo stealing the show as fish-out-of-water alien-posing-as-human Aximili, who turns a simple cab ride into a comedy of errors.

There was so much that could have been done to make this a quality show. For one thing, get rid of that Boris kid! Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the obvious choice, as his personality and appearance were both perfect! And Gregory Smith would have been amazing as Jake- he's always the actor I imagined in that part. That said, the other actors were all pretty good choices (and I loved the Tobias pick), so no more problems there.

Next issue: If memory serves me correctly (and it probably doesn't- I only watched the first episode before giving up on it), they did a weekly or nightly half-hour show on Nickelodeon. Wrong length, wrong station. If they had done what Farscape did and made it an hour-long special on Fox or some other channel, they'd have had a lot more flexibility to do it right. Nickelodeon is for brainless cartoons- they no longer know how to handle real quality programming.

They shouldn't have done it without better funding than they had- no sci-fi/fantasy story, even one for kids/teenagers, will work on a shoestring budget. Why not gear some of that book/merchandise revenue to the show, in turn getting good ratings and making more money as you increase interest in both sets of the series? Was their marketer on sedatives?

But even with everything as it was, I believe (and if anyone reads this who has seen the show will probably agree) what lost the fanbase was its nearly complete disregard for the books. It retained the characters, the aliens and the idea of morphing- and that was about it. And it failed utterly, being cancelled not long after it began.

Animorphs was an amazingly well-written series that hooked most of us by the mix of crazy humor and emotion-wrenching drama. Whether it was plausible or even entirely original didn't matter because the author (props to Mrs. Applegate) did such a good job. If anything, the TV show hurt that. From reading the posts, a lot of kids who got a glimpse of the show decided that the books must have been just as awful (or *gasp* unaware that there even were books). The show could have been so much more- it could have contended among the best preteen/teenager programming, and been a guilty pleasure for the adults out there. But it wasn't, so I bid it a wistful but otherwise indifferent farewell. I'll stick to my original sorrow over the book series ending.