An Animorphs Movie

Speed up and streamline the morphing. If not being found out by a quick grab of a cell phone is the worry, then make it so that the Animorphs can duck around a tree as a tiger and come out a person on the other side in a second, fully clothed.

Yeah, but a huge part of the appeal of the series is the nauseating Body Horror in the morph descriptions. That's a big part of why I'd want to see Animorphs in a visual medium.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Oct 4th 2020 at 9:00:14 AM

Was I the odd one out who didn't find the morphs nauseating? I honestly started skimming past them most of the time halfway through the series.

I never actually found them nauseating, the only thing that can nauseate me is Real Life horror, fiction can't affect me in that way. I know a lot of other people did, though, and while I wasn't grossed out by the descriptions, I did LOVE reading them. I still remember Cassie's angel wings, Marco's bone fingers, Ax the scorpion from Planet Kill or Be Killed, or just the entirety of the Poodle book.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Oct 4th 2020 at 9:06:27 AM

Perhaps the Animorph business causes recording devices in the vicinity to go haywire. If you want to adapt the series in a more modern context.

That just seems too convenient, though, nothing is ever convenient for the Animorphs unless the Ellimist is involved, and even then, there's always an asterisk. Aside from that, it raises questions about why they even bother with the Morphing Detectors if morphing produces an electromagnetic field, and it also ruins quite a few pure stealth missions.

"Yeah, but a huge part of the appeal of the series is the nauseating Body Horror in the morph descriptions. That's a big part of why I'd want to see Animorphs in a visual medium."

That's what the comics are for then. The subject was how adapt the series into the modern day. Saying changes makes things too convenient for them seems weird when if you leave it as is then it becomes much harder for them to operate in modern society.

Technically, the subject is about the upcoming movie, and I don't think we've heard anything one way or another about what time period it's set in.

Those earlier posts were me rejecting the basic concept of an Animorphs set in the modern day, but I just watched that Pop Arena video, and I can kind of see how a modern-day Animorphs could be spun, even if logistically, the series still wouldn't make sense in an era of cell phones.

I think there's a good compromise out there, have it be set in the 90s, but directed in a way that highlights how prescient a lot of the themes within are to modern day.

Y'know, funny thing. The main thing that the Ellimist contributed in his first appearance was facilitating a plot where the Animorphs time travel to the future and witness the doomed world the Yeerks will create if they prevail. But later books would wind up establishing that you can just be blasted through time by explosions. So you technically could do Book #7 without the Ellimist.

Of course, The Ellimist has a much larger role in the series as a whole than sario rips do. Also, the Time Matrix exists! Man, this series had a weirdly plentiful number of ways to time travel for a series that is not, in any way, shape, or form, about time travel.

The hard thing about the Ellimist is that his role in the story is mostly optional. Nothing he does is really necessary to the story of the Animorphs. Except for that one thing he did that is absolutely critically necessary and dramatically altered the story in a way that can't really be done without the godlike powers of this mysterious entity. I'm talking, of course, about restoring Tobias's morphing powers and letting him acquire his own human form through time fuckery.

Good. Fucking. Luck. Explaining how that happened without the Ellimist.

EDIT: Incidentally, I do find it interesting how cheaty that idea was to release Tobias from the consequences of overstaying the time limit (a constant source of tension in the series), and how the cheatiness works. By giving Tobias a one-off non-reproduceable coupon to cheat the NO MO' MORPHIN' consequence, Applegate was able to free Tobias up to be an active player in the morphing plot again without undercutting the tension of the time limit.

Tobias got to demonstrate why it's very important to respect the time limit but then was given a Get Out of Jail Free card, with the caveat that more such cards cannot be counted on to arrive so respect the motherfucking time limit. And even that card wasn't really "Get out of consequence" so much as "Kinda get out of consequence BUT". Terms and conditions may apply.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 5th 2020 at 9:57:07 AM

Plus, y'know, if he wants to keep his morphing ability, he was to stay as a hawk, and can't go back to being human.

The time limit is actually an interesting plot point in its own right. It allowed Applegate to inject tension without needing an external threat. There are plenty of points in the series where the main source of tension isn't ALIEN INVADER DOIN' A THING but rather "Will we morph back in time?"

Of course, the exact amount of time left was immeasurable to an audience. The characters always had exactly as much time left as they needed to escape. Applegate, very early in the series, had to introduce the idea that Andalites have internal time measurement powers so that Ax could replace "Tobias with a watch on his leg" as the go-to clock, because she needed some way of constantly reiterating how much time there was to the audience so we could be properly freaked out when time ran low.

But this is very much something that worked out for the slower pace of literature. I'm not sure how well the time limit would work out as a tension-generator for film. In film, you don't have as much space to dwell on the intangible. 90% of a book is the characters expressing their thoughts and feelings about what is transpiring. 90% of a film is things transpiring.

Plus, film has to reckon with the fact that events are happening in what an audience expects to at least approximate real-time. If you say the Animorphs have three minutes to get to safety and get out of morph, the events that lead to them safely demorphing can't take longer than three minutes to progress or else you have a Frieza's Five Minutes scenario. And once "minutes" cease to be literal with the ultra-precise time limit threat, the entire notion of the time limit is defanged.

This does happen in film, but it's always hilarious and stupid.

• Bomb counter: 0:17, 0:16, 0:15....
• Three minutes of action happen
• Bomb counter: 0:33, 0:32....

In a book, five minutes are however fucking long the writer says they are. But in a film (at least, a well-made one), five minutes should be five fucking minutes. Less if there are scene cuts. So the time limit is not only more difficult to enforce as a point of tension in film, but is also less effective as a threat since we're not privy to the characters' internal thoughts and anxieties.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 5th 2020 at 11:06:33 AM

Technically that wasn’t time travel. That was the Ellimist creating a false reality that looked like a potential future but really was him dropping clues about which building to raid for the Yeerks’ Kandrona. He made it look like time travel because the rules of his duel with Crayak meant he couldn’t tell the heroes directly.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Oct 5th 2020 at 11:46:35 AM

Given how much ancillary weirdness there is in this series, making a good adaptation will probably mean knowing how much of the craft to leave out.