Animorphs Revisited
Once, seated around the wreckage of a summer barbecue, some college friends and I had the proverbial “what childhood books would you want with you on a desert island?” conversation. It became clear that, for this crowd, The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia were the frontrunners. Not for me, though. Despite a homeschooled childhood, I’d never found myself dazzled by Middle Earth the way others were. Sure, I’d enjoyed watching the epic battles play out on the big screen during the mid-aughts as much as anybody, but readingwise I ground to a halt halfway through The Two Towers. The piles of extraneous detail and long deviations from the main quest put me off. I’ve never felt a pull to go back and finish them either. Can’t explain it.
Because I was in my cups during this conversation, I decided to chuck some gas on the fire. I declared that my choice would be Harry Potter, hands down. After the predictable return fire, I joked, “Honestly, I’d prefer The Animorphs books to The Lord of the Rings any day,” and was promptly drowned out by howls of objection.
Years later, on social media, I saw a blub drift past announcing that Warner Brothers had purchased the movie rights to The Animorphs series. A Hollywood adaptation would be forthcoming, it seemed. The project, as far as I know, remains in limbo, but the image that accompanied the news — a still frame from the late nineties Nickelodeon TV show — sparked something in me. It was of five kids, faces deadly serious, attired in the baggy anti-fashion of the day, and of a mouthless creature that looked like a blue deer with a scorpion tail, and also of a red-tailed hawk that hovered above them. Their names came to mind readily, despite decades in deep storage.
Jake. Cassie. Rachel. Marco. Ax.
You could be forgiven for being unfamiliar with The Animorphs. The series hit the shelves in ’95 during the salad days of the Scholastic book club. They emerged alongside pulpy (and mostly ghost-written) titles like Goosebumps, The Babysitters Club, and Choose Your Own Adventure. Churn and burn tales cranked out by the pound in some grad student sweat shop. Sensational, fast-paced literary crack for the eleven year-old reader, they were produced cheaply and meant to be consumed like Happy Meals.
But I remember, one day at the library, spinning the rotating shelf of Scholastic books and coming face to face with a cheesy early-CGI-generated image of a solemn blond boy transforming into a red-tailed hawk. Animorphs, the blocky title script announced.
I picked it up, of course.
It took about a year for me to gobble up the majority of the series. The stories inspired me to scrawl down copious amounts of fan fiction on loose printer paper and the backs of receipts left lying around. I savored the ability to play around with the world of the story, to put words in the characters’ mouths. I dreamt about the Animorphs, often that I was one of them. I checked out my favorites over and over from the library. Then one day I moved on to other things and forgot about them completely.
Until the news about the movie, that is. Curious, I checked YouTube and noticed that someone had uploaded the audio books for the entire series. I decided to take a shot on the first book, thinking I might listen to a few chapters and catch a nostalgia buzz.
It begins like this:
My name is Jake.
That’s my first name, obviously.
I can’t tell you my last name.
It would be too dangerous.
I had the strange sensation of having discovered a letter left behind in an abandoned house, a sort of SOS. I couldn’t help myself. I listened to the whole thing that night while watching moths immolate themselves against the lamps above my balcony.
If any world qualifies as dystopian, it is the one in which the Animorphs find themselves. On their way home from the mall, a group of young teens takes a shortcut through a deserted construction site and encounters a wounded alien amid the wreckage of his crashed ship. Before his demise, this alien warns them that Earth is under attack by a different race of aliens, a parasitic species called Yeerks, blind slugs that crawl into the ear canal and spread themselves over the host’s brain, seizing total control of brain and body. Some humans had already become “controllers”, Yeerk-occupied individuals who appear to speak and behave as normal. This alien, Elfangor, also shares a piece of advanced technology: the power to morph into any organism to which they have access (they must touch it to acquire the DNA). He tells the kids they must use the morphing power to fight the Yeerks and defend the human race from enslavement. Then Yeerk ships appear in the sky and the kids flee. From the shadows, they watch the Yeerks murder the alien with their ray guns, the first of many deaths they are to witness.
One of the Animorphs, an empathic black girl named Cassie, works (conveniently) at an animal shelter, and her mom is a zookeeper, so the kids have access to virtually any morph they could ask for. They each select a unique “battle morph” (lion, tiger, elephant, gorilla) for direct combat, but they also infiltrate Yeerk enclaves as fleas and roaches, take the fight to the oceans as a pod of dolphins, and surveil Yeerk operations from the skies through the eyes of ospreys and eagles. Often they struggle to subdue the animal instincts, sometimes in terrifying ways, such as when they lose nearly all sense of self to a termite queen’s mind-smothering pheromones, and other times in a hilarious manner, such as becoming so caught-up the dolphin-mind’s love of leaping and splashing that they nearly forget about their mission. Wild stuff.
I get it — it sounds like goofy tween fare, and plenty of aspects (the cheesy cover art, the use of cringey sound effects like TSEW! Or TSEEEERRRRRR! as stand-ins for the sounds of laser fire, and the clunky ’90s high school banter) totally are. They don’t belong in the hallowed halls of literature by a long shot. But for the sake of comparison, I picked up an old Goosebumps book (another series I devoured back in the day) I found moldering in our family basement and tried to give it another go. After three pages, I tossed it in the trash. Totally unreadable, a story (and writing style) that only worked if you were ten and had never read anything else. With The Animorphs, though, I felt as if I’d been dropped back into a world where I’d used to live, like I’d returned to Narnia, so to speak (only a nightmarish sci-fi version populated by brain-sucking slugs in place of chatty beavers). I had the sensation that this battle had continued to rage even as I’d paid it no mind, like I and the other pimply members of the Scholastic book club had simply been some drop-in camera crew deployed to film a bit of crisis journalism for the BBC, then catch the last airlift out. I felt the literary equivalent of survivor’s guilt, like I had abandoned my friends to an appalling fate and moseyed on with my life.
Why would you want to return to such an awful world, you might ask? The weird thing is that the world is, somehow, not awful. The kids heroically try to get on with their high school lives, reserving the Animorph thing for late night missions and clandestine raids. They continue hanging in the halls of their high school and gathering for late night video game sessions in attic bedrooms. Rachel hunts Gap jean deals and hangs out at the mall. It is very much a “kid by day, superhero by night” vibe, and it takes the edge off, at least for a young reader — as an adult, the darkness is far more apparent. And then there’s the morphing itself. As a first time reader, I savored the wild perspective shifts they would take, the painstaking care Applegate took to make you see through the kaleidoscope insanity of a fly’s eyes, or communicate the thrill of sneaking into a controller neighbor’s house disguised as the family dog. Even with the looming Yeerk menace, the world feels warm and homey, the sort of place an eleven year-old would give about anything to live in, spending their after-school hours soaring atop the thermals in a red-tailed hawk morph flanked by the ultra-cool Animorph kids.
Despite the series’ assembly line treatment, its author, Katherine Applegate, managed to imbue her characters and world with that elusive “it” factor of fiction: realness. I knew them then and shared their world, and twenty year later I came to realize that I still knew them. It struck me that perhaps a skilled author, even one pursuing a commercial jackpot, can’t help but infuse their work with authenticity, bits of themselves. Maybe a true author knows that the best way to reach the masses is still with a good story, well-told.
A good story, a fun and enchanted world, but ultimately not a happy one. The question that animates the series — what is it to be a child soldier, and how does that warp your mind and crush your spirit? — really only become apparent to the adult reader. But that’s what Animorphs is about, kids conscripted to wage a lonely war, a conflict with steep personal costs. Jake, the gang’s unspoken leader, must wrestle with the question of whether to kill his elder brother, a high-ranking controller. Tobias, who in the first book of the series breaks the cardinal rule of morphing (never stay in morph longer than two hours or you will be forever trapped in whatever animal body you currently occupy) and must live out his days as a red-tailed hawk, nested in the woods and feeding on rabbits and mice, torn between his love of flight and the liberty of animal existence and his desire to hug his friends and taste the pop tarts and arcade nachos of his former life. Rachel, an erstwhile valley girl and mall rat who becomes addicted to the rush of battle and must contend with a growing inner bloodlust.
Or most memorably, gentle Cassie, who at one point becomes infested with a Yeerk and comes to sympathize with their plight as, absent a host body, blind and helpless creatures. She strikes a deal with the Yeerk, promising that she will trap herself in a caterpillar morph forever to share her pain if the Yeerk will agree to stop infesting humans (the deal falls apart, but not because Cassie is unwilling to go through with it). This was the first time in my childhood that I recall such a radical shift in perspective, a view through the enemy’s eyes (or lack thereof). After this incident, Cassie is forced to contend with a sometimes dangerous sympathy for their foe.
As the series progresses, the kids become less and less assured that their sacrifice will have any effect. They come to doubt humanity’s chances against the technological supremacy of the Yeerk empire. It could all very well be for nought — so why not give up and be kids for however long they have? Why bother to fight if their fate might already sealed: a slug burrowed into the gray folds of their brains, reading their most private thoughts and manipulating their limbs like marionettes?
Some of them begin to succumb to existential despair. All suffer nightmares, flashbacks of their tiger fangs or hawk talons tearing out controllers’ throats. Early on they agree that to serve as a Yeerk host is a fate worse than death. They decide that it is licit to harm controllers for the sake of the human race, but none of them ever really become comfortable with this. They all pine for their old selves, the innocence that they, even if they win the war, will never recover.
The series concludes with the Animorphs intentionally crashing a spacecraft into the Yeerk mother ship, a suicide strike that they pray will turn the tide and preserve the remainder of the human race long enough for help to arrive from elsewhere in the galaxy. When I read this as a twelve year old, curled up under the covers with a reading lamp, I did not despair. There was no Aslan or Gandalf to swoop in and save the day, to tell them everything would be alright, and this shook me for sure, but something about it felt grown-up. Age has only made me feel the power of this more. We can’t know if our actions make a difference, or if the sacrifices are worth it, or even if our “adversaries” are in the wrong, but we must stay loyal to our friends and try anyway. That’s faith, a thing which, once lost, renders the world unbearable, and exactly the sort of thing a kid ought to read, even if the full scope of the world remains invisible, concealed behind the glitter of adventure. In fact, that’s the point of children’s literature: to stir up the will to fight for the good in spite of fear, but not to overwhelm with the immensity of the opposition. A precarious balance to strike. Too far in the direction of dystopia and you’ll stoke despair, but too much reassurance that some higher power will swoop in to make everything work out and it becomes dull.
I can’t answer the perennial question of why some things stand the test of time and others don’t, why some fictional worlds beckon you back with open arms and others seal themselves up behind you as soon as you leave. All I can tell you is that Animorphs possesses both of those rare and precious qualities. While other series of the time may have been pleasant diversions to fill the time riding in the back seat as the family shuttled between school and baseball practice, Animorphs is an actual world brought lovingly into existence by an invested author, one that carries on whether there are eyes on its pages or not. One, like Harry Potter, that only hits harder with age. When I said I’d bring the Animorphs to the desert island, I was joking. Now I’m serious.