Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: Rit on July 28, 2014, 02:27:43 PM
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Hello all,
I'm not much of a contributor to the forums yet I'm a huge Animorphs fan. I picked up the first book in 1996 as soon as I saw it at a school book fair. This was the first book that actually captured my attention as a child (9 years old at the time). The next few book fairs I picked up a few more, out of order, and devoured them. By the time I was 14 I decided to read the first book again. After reading it, I began to wonder where the series had gone from that point on. I started to do research and found that the series had ended in 2001. I read every single book in the series over the course of a summer. I rediscovered them in my 20s and decided to do a reread of the entire series.
The series as a whole is absolutely great but a lot of it's problems are due to the marketing of it. To keep up with the series, they began to hire ghost writers to write the books. Most of them were poorly written while others were somewhat acceptable. I think it's a shame that such a great series was rushed due to marketing and deadlines. I wish KA had been allowed enough time to perfect her series altogether. Think of an artist who paints a picture and comes to personally frame it in your living room. Once you see it, you ask if the artist could redo it so that it goes with your couch. The artist would walk out with his painting and tell you to get a new couch. I don't blame KA. It's just the way business works. I just find it a shame that this series wasn't given that respect.
I was very satisfied with the ending. I understand that many of you absolutely hated it. I believe that the ending was perfect considering the themes of the series. It was a believable outcome and it tugged at us emotionally.
I would truly like to see this as a movie. I think that a TV series would be better considering how many books there are. The Nickelodeon series was atrocious (not a bad attempt for the times though). At one point, I thought that this would work as an anime but the more I considered it, America just won't get it right. Japan could probably accomplish this and do it right, but I don't see it happening. If the rerelease had gone well, we probably would have seen a movie released. The marketing for the series just wasn't any good, especially for the times. If you really think about it, it would have been better to make a movie or TV series before marketing the books again. I also believe that a 90s setting is a crucial part of the series and, in my opinion, nothing should be changed. I don't think we should even replace them with 16 year olds. If you really think about it, it would have been better to make a movie or TV series and then rerelease the books at the same time or after. That would have been a gamble but I can assure that the series would have gained a lot of popularity that way.
Considering all of this, I think we should write a letter attached with a petition to Sony Pictures about making a movie or TV series. I understand that this has been done many times before without result. Given that there are so many Animorphs fans, I think that this can still be accomplished. The letter and petition will need to be done right to convince them that Animorphs is worthy to make a movie or TV series out of. I assure you that this can be done. As an adult, already entered into the workforce, one of my main jobs is to get third-party companies to do their jobs (it's amazing what can be done if the right questions are asked). With the right approach, the same can be done with Sony. Sony works for us and not the other way around. I will work tirelessly to have this series adapted. I would also like to see KA's involvement in the process of the adaptation so that it's done right (of course it is up to her whether or not to become involved). It would help to get as much support as possible for this. Think of the series 'Firefly' and the outrage of fans once it was cancelled. They ended up with the movie 'Serenity'. I would also like to note that I agree with most of you that Joss Whedon would be perfect for adapting this (not so much Michael Bay, guh). In fact, I think most independent film makers would have satisfactory results.
Please reply or contact me via PM to discuss this and offer any suggestions. This is a group project and I plan to consider everyone's concerns as a whole in this letter. Thank you for taking the time to read this and I look forward to connecting with all of you as we all share a common interest in the Animorphs series. There is no doubt in my mind that we can have this done.
-Rit
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I am now imagining Animorphs as an anime and the idea keeps making me giggle like an idiot. I dunno, it usually turns out funny when Japan attempts Western culture.
Also, I think it would really work better as a medium-budget TV show. The short, episodic nature of the books really lends itself to being told in weekly one-hour blocks.
Animorphs probably doesn't have the same kind of following and fandom power as Firefly, but it could still happen. All us '90s kids are grown up now, and getting into places where we can make this a reality.
Speaking of Michael Bay, the first problem that really needs to be resolved is the question that hit Transformers so hard because it went unanswered. Who is the target audience for this? Transformers suffered because it wasn't sure if it wanted to be a kids movie, or an action movie for people who grew up with it years ago. As a result, you have a movie with dumb potty humor jokes alongside people getting straight-up massacred by terrifying robots.
So when doing Animorphs, do you keep the brutal violence, blood and gore, and dark psychological themes? Or do you censor it to an extent for the age group it originally targeted? (I definitely vote the former.)
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That is absolutely the best description of the Transformers movies I've ever come across. Thank you. :D
I would like for them to stay as true to the series as possible. I think that they should concentrate on the core themes of the books. Each character is unique in their own way. Jake's leadership. Rachel's violent nature. Tobias's human vs hawk conflict. Marco's comic relief. Cassie's morality. I think that there should be a strong focus on these aspects if a movie or TV series were made. I don't think that they should hold back at all and make it all glossy like Twilight. They need to pull a Hunger Games on this one.
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I've been thinking of this for quite a while and there are some limitations.
First off, there is not "lots of Animorphs fans out there". Animorphs ended in 2001, most people reading it then are already 20-30 yrs old now. Most of the people forgot about it, or just took it as another kids adventure book. The remaining fanbase is really small for a big budget movie. And yes, I do think a big budget movie is necessary to really put Animorphs to life. There's some super heavy CGI out there for the morphs and some convincing Andalites, Hork Bajir, Taxxxon, and all those alien morphs of Visser Three. You really need someone as determined as James Cameron to make a high budget film like this.
Second, Animorphs have 54 books. Most of the books (almost all the ghost written ones) are not worth filming, but even most of the good ones had some over-simplified endings. In an action sci-fi film it's almost required that you put up a grand fight in the end, and the Animorphs series really don't have much of that, lots of the stories end up with them bailing to save their butts. And most stories are too short so they'd have to merge and put lots of effort into rewriting the script.
And then there's the dilemma, do you make it a cheesy teen fantasy movie (Harry Potter, Hunger Games, etc) or do you go big and make it a big superficial hero action movie (like Avengers, X-men, etc) or do you want to explore the dark sides of Animorphs and make it deep (you'll have to buy Christopher Nolan or David Fincher for this)... It's hard to predict the level of success here, and the budget will be huge so missing would be really devastating
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Yeah, it's pretty much unfilmable as a movie/series of movies. The budget's one thing, but moreso it's just the tone of the thing. No studio's going to spend that type of money on something like Animorphs, without forcing the creative team to neuter it and make it more palatable.
Mostly the major hurdle is the 13 year old (at the time of #1) thing. The books aren't in their ultra-dark stage by then, no, but it's the type of thing that the soccer moms and cultural talking heads frequently get up in arms about. You can't really have 8th graders fighting some morally-complex & bloody Vietnam-esque guerrilla war and keep a PG-13 rating. I mean, The Hunger Games seems fairly tame and acceptable given the themes, and that's about as intense as you can get in the blockbuster/studio system if your protagonists are kids.
And, sure, there's the argument "you could just make them highschool seniors" or whatever, personally I'd prefer no movie at all if liberties that substantial were being taken with it. Would lose so much impact.
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I'm kinda of the opinion that nothing is completely unfilmable. I know I felt that way about The Hunger Games and Ender's Game (which turned out okay as adaptations go, weirder parts included). Someone could do it if they were determined.
One change I wouldn't really care about is if they made them high school freshmen, fourteen years old. Some of the ways they described their school activities, even early in the series, seemed more like high school to me than junior high. And, Chapman continued to stick around, even after the summer break which would have put them in a new school. In the end, it's less than one year's difference, and it makes the moral guardians feel slightly less on edge if it's high schoolers doing it.
Personally, I think the biggest obstacle is the size of the fanbase. It's just not going to get the kind of traction needed to make a movie happen. Not like Firefly did.
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Well, even that's apples and oranges. Serenity was a cheap-as-hell movie ($17 million from memory I think?) as far as big special-effects films. The amount of people campaigning for Firefly after the show was ditched was still pretty laughably small, they were just very vocal. And half of that was Joss fighting so hard himself to get it made. It's not like Universal spent a significant amount of cash or layed out much risk to resurrect it, Serenity was pure fan-pandering (as much as I'm a FF/Serenity geek and I'm glad it got made).
Animorphs is a little different. To do book #1 with any kind of production values you're still looking at, say, $80-90 million at the least, probably more, higher-end blockbusters are like an average of $150-ish.
And unless they're ultra-confident they're making that money back, no studio's going to greenlight it. That means a PG-13 rating (which, sure, you don't want it R anyway, Animorphs has still gotta be viewable by older kids, say 10-11+), and that means playing their game since you're spending a buttload of their money. Likely means making it much more "good v.s. bad", softening a lot of the terrible decisions the kids have to make, and even simple stuff like "you're showing grizzly bears and tigers fighting with teeth & claws, but no blood's allowed on screen". You don't want anything gratuitous, no, but you do want to keep that ability to suspend disbelief, it's gotta have a little grit and realism. Stuff like The Hunger games has such heavy themes, but you don't see any exploration of it on-screen and it all feels really sanitized and safe. I wouldn't want that for Animorphs. You'd have to go, like, Terminator 2 in tone, without all the cussing, pretty much. PG-13, but right up there bordering the line and pushing the limits of that. It'd have to be a little more visceral than, say, The Avengers or the recent Batman flicks, to keep any sense of it not being laughable.
And that's not gonna fly these days, you'd have the choice of "soften it up", "suffer an R rating and we'll only give you $20 mil to make it, and the kids all have to be approaching 18", or "be satisfied with the books, don't mess with a good thing by trying to force it into a movie series". You just can't adapt/translate the books as they are and keep any sort of reasonable budget for effects and production, the reality is you'd be playing ball with the executives and getting something palatable, that they're comfortable selling Happy Meals with.
It's been that way since Batman Returns in '92, unfortunately, and even that wasn't dealing with kid protagonists, or close-quarters fighting with tooth & nail. Animorphs has the whole...genocide & slavery thing going on, to boot.
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Yeah, it's definitely a miracle Serenity happened. And that's what I'm saying, basically.
Ultimately, I think the best chance this has of happening is an unsanctioned fan film, possibly animated. They'd just have to stay under the radar for as long as possible until they can get it made. I was semi-involved with a project on deviantArt a while ago to make an animated film of the Brian Jacques book Mossflower, from the Redwall series. It started off well, we had storyboards, good voice actors, brilliant artists/animators, a screenplay, and even personal critique and advice on character design from the man Don Bluth himself. Unfortunately, a little while after Brian Jacques' death, the copyright holders for Redwall found out about the project and sent a cease and desist. It was pretty sad, but that's what happens. Fan-made content technically kinda straddles the legal line, which is why I think we need a heavy revision of some of those laws.
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Yeah, there have been a few attempts at stuff like that over the years, Project AM and such. I think only a couple of comic strip ideas have got off the ground, unfortunately.
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Well I do think the Animorphs is a good idea for the big screen. And the concept could easily turn into a deep hero franchise. But it's just too risky for the big studios to throw in the money. The CGI required is pretty much Avatar level. And nobody could really promise that it would sell well. Also, you really have to hire scriptwriters to squeeze KA's books into movies. The plots of the Animorphs books aren't as good as Harry Potter's to automatically quality as scripts.
I don't think the characters will be 13 years old... Actually, I don't even view them as 13 years old when I'm reading them. I think of them as 16 year olds starting off and 18 year olds when the war ended.
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Well, sure, you're obviously open to visualizing it however you want, but that's not what's on the page. To me having them start at 16-17-18 really loses such a huge chunk of the impact of how horrible it all is. Jake as the "boy general" and all, by the time he's only just old enough to enlist in the army as a private he's been through more and seen more than any Navy SEAL or career colonel/general. You're not really going to be able to delve into those themes in a movie, without pissing off soccer moms to the point they're creating petitions and going on Oprah/Ellen/Katie etc to "have a serious conversation about the effect entertainment's having on the children".
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Well, sure, you're obviously open to visualizing it however you want, but that's not what's on the page. To me having them start at 16-17-18 really loses such a huge chunk of the impact of how horrible it all is. Jake as the "boy general" and all, by the time he's only just old enough to enlist in the army as a private he's been through more and seen more than any Navy SEAL or career colonel/general. You're not really going to be able to delve into those themes in a movie, without pissing off soccer moms to the point they're creating petitions and going on Oprah/Ellen/Katie etc to "have a serious conversation about the effect entertainment's having on the children".
Haven't they already done that, though? I remember reading that Animorphs was the most controversial kids' book series before Harry Potter. That didn't really slow it down at all. Controversy only adds to viewership and popularity, because everyone wants to find out what all the hubbub is about. In fact, that's probably what contributed in large part to Animorphs' popularity in the first place, just like with Harry Potter.
The thing is, they could just not market it towards kids. Imagine if Game of Thrones was only about the Stark kids. It would still be watched by adults, and it probably wouldn't be any more controversial than it already is.
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Well, if you're going to sell to kids of late elementaries, your characters need to be 12-ish. Ash Ketchum was 10 years old when he started traveling all over Japan to catch Pokemon and fight some huge battles. Does it make any sense that in any universe parents would agree that their 10 year old children go out there, abandon school, and fight monsters, with no parent guardian? No. If this occupation existed at all, the pokemon trainers would be at least 18 years old when they left home, but how can you sell that to little kids then?
There was never really any reason out there that they had to be 13. The only factor is that they still lived with their parents so they couldn't be college age yet. Oh and Jake's older brother had to be in school as well... So you put that all together, and KA had to go with the age that would profit her series the most, which was the absolute minimum that made fighting possible.
If they do make a movie, the kids can't be 13 year old. I saw the movie Super 8, and the whole time I was thinking why I was even watching it. Okay I guess I'm not a great person, but it happens. Adults can't really relate to kids that haven't even hit puberty.
And Animorphs never really stressed over how horrific it is to have kids fighting in the war. Yeah KA did portray war as cruel and horrible and full of moral conflicts, but it was never really about how kids can't be forced into these roles. It's not that I wanted to see them as 16 year olds. They just seemed more like high schoolers to me. And it just seemed that the only reason they were 13 was that KA wanted her characters to be of an age most attractive to her primary audience. That does matter, you know. That's why Justin Bieber is so popular among young kids. He looks relatable. As the kids grow up they will develop a different sense of what's sexy, but at that age its easy to like teens over adults. But we're all past that now.
Plus, it's easier to find good actors if you just want "young", instead of "haven't hit puberty". You don't come across people with freakish talent at a young age like Natalie Portman everyday, but a 22 year old actor with more experience and better acting could easily pass as 16.
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Haven't they already done that, though? I remember reading that Animorphs was the most controversial kids' book series before Harry Potter. That didn't really slow it down at all. Controversy only adds to viewership and popularity, because everyone wants to find out what all the hubbub is about. In fact, that's probably what contributed in large part to Animorphs' popularity in the first place, just like with Harry Potter.
The thing is, they could just not market it towards kids. Imagine if Game of Thrones was only about the Stark kids. It would still be watched by adults, and it probably wouldn't be any more controversial than it already is.
Books are seriously different to a visual medium, though. That scene toward the end of the series, forget the specific book, where Jake comes across the recently-abandoned human host who's dying and begging for a blanket because he's cold, and Jake backs out of the room in tiger morph to just leave him there, slipping on the blood-soaked floor in the process? You can write that on a page and (somehow, I don't know how they dodged the editors/censors on that) get away with it. You'd get production notes from the financiers 30 seconds after even suggesting doing that, with a movie.
With Game Of Thrones, I'm not entirely sure of the rating system on cable, but obviously if you take that show and put it on a network or turn it into a movie, that's an R-rating. Instantly. It's a little different, you can do that on HBO with a relatively-small, paying audience. You're not getting something of that nature in a multiplex and allowed for under-18s, though.
Cathey, Super 8 was a stunning movie. Serious "how dare you?!" moment there. :P That's basically exactly what Animorphs should be in terms of the kid's ages and that natural believable character-interaction. Take that late-70s Spielberg/Amblin tone and transpose it to the 90s, and have the balls to make the war stuff plausible/non-sanitized, and you'd be golden.
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Ah, missed this the first time around:
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"And Animorphs never really stressed over how horrific it is to have kids fighting in the war"
Katherine Applegate (and Michael Grant, I guess) strongly disagrees, given the post-series letter/correspondence she wrote. I do too. What was Animorphs if not the antithesis of big & bright & fun rock-'em-sock'-'em kid's adventure/superhero series? There's obviously plenty of levity in the books too, and the initial intent of exploring the animal world in a fun way, but you'd be hard pressed to say that by 3/4 of the way through the series Animorphs hadn't delved into some pretty surprisingly intense & controversial, complicated material, where kids are borderline war criminals, some of the evil alien slugs aren't all that evil, and alien allies decide they might want to commit 6-billion-people genocide on a little blue backwater world.
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Books are seriously different to a visual medium, though. That scene toward the end of the series, forget the specific book, where Jake comes across the recently-abandoned human host who's dying and begging for a blanket because he's cold, and Jake backs out of the room in tiger morph to just leave him there, slipping on the blood-soaked floor in the process? You can write that on a page and (somehow, I don't know how they dodged the editors/censors on that) get away with it. You'd get production notes from the financiers 30 seconds after even suggesting doing that, with a movie.
With Game Of Thrones, I'm not entirely sure of the rating system on cable, but obviously if you take that show and put it on a network or turn it into a movie, that's an R-rating. Instantly. It's a little different, you can do that on HBO with a relatively-small, paying audience. You're not getting something of that nature in a multiplex and allowed for under-18s, though.
Yeah, that scene from MM4 was haunting. The book just cold opens on the aftermath of a battle, and we don't even learn what it was about. Jake had clawed up the controller's face so badly, the ear was blocked and the yeerk couldn't get out, so he just watches as the guy bleeds out from wounds he'd inflicted. "I'm dying, Andalite. Does that make you happy?" Then he staggers out of the room with only three limbs, listening to Rachel roaring in bloodlust because she's run out of things to kill, and morphing just before he dies of blood loss. It's mostly moments like those that desperately make me want to see this as a GoT style show. Seriously, the amount of censor-dodging Applegate got away with in the company that published and sold these books alongside The Magic School Bus and Franklin the Turtle is absolutely astounding. Especially in Visser, with all the sex, drugs, and booze references she dolloped over top of the bloody violence. Saying that the horror of children being forced to fight wasn't stressed is pretty ridiculous, in my opinion.
Game of Thrones isn't quite a small audience by any means, though. It's the most-pirated show in history, and despite being primarily marketed toward 20-30 year old males, the actual audience is pretty much everyone (everyone who's comfortable with that level of violence and nudity, that is). If you make a product that is just objectively good, people will love it. The whole fantasy genre has always been a pretty big risk for filmmakers, as they had a tendency to be expensively effects-heavy and flop mega hard, even if they became cult classics later. GoT works because it's a dark-as-hell drama about likable people, which is something Animorphs fairly well.
So I guess there's your answer. Forget Sony, Fox and Disney. We petition HBO to make this show. ;D
Haven't seen Super 8 yet, but it is on my long and ever-expanding To Watch/Read list.
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It's a big cultural phenomenon, yeah, but it's still HBO. You're not getting, like, The Big Bang Theory "Joe & Jane suburbia and the kids" audiences with it, and they're all paying (aside from the pirates, haha) so you can get away with more. I guess my point is: GoT never had a chance of getting on free-to-air TV. If they did it as a movie series instead, it'd be an R.
And, hey, I don't think Animorphs should be quite that intense, it's gotta be suitable for say 10-13 year old kids. But I'd make the argument that it should be only barely, you've gotta push that envelope a bit with Animorphs as it's kind of the whole point. The good guys don't win, and even in their victories they're severely ****ed-up in the aftermath, the villains are eventually portrayed as...well, not sympathetic, but semi-empathetic, there are moral dilemmas and conflicts among the kids and the actual fighting seems real.
I guess what I'm getting at is you can't do Animorphs as light & breezy and "clean" as something like Transformers, or some of the lighter superhero movies (in terms of intensity) like Thor or whatever. It can't be a fairy-tale like Star Wars, or a gung-ho G.I. Joe sort of feel either. You don't want to go all gratuitous, but what I've always thought about Animorphs is it's so easily laughable if you do it wrong. Probably moreso than other series. "Kids turning into animals to fight aliens, in the suburbs" can so easily be hilariously dumb, unless you have that grit and genuine "reality" to things like the fighting and the setpieces. Sure, keep all the light moments and the humor, that's obviously an equally huge part of the books, but it's almost this duality: Animorphs gets ultra-dark, and it gets ultra-sardonic and funny. But you need , both for it to work, you can't go down the middle and make it safe and acceptable. The problem is, Katherine probably did get away with more than she probably should have been able to in writing it for a YA audience, some sort of fluke, and you're not going to be so lucky in a medium that's not...you know, text.
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Well I'm not saying that I'm the standard for the movie viewers of my age, but for more people than the opposite, it's very hard to watch kid-lead movies when they're adults. My strong nostalgia and the fact that Daniel still looked cute back then helped me bear through the first 2 Harry Potter films when I re-watched the series after graduated from college, but that's pretty much it. That's as far as I can go watching young teens as heroes. Narnia was okay mainly because the younger kids weren't exactly portrayed as "heroes". Sorry I really can't debate if Super 8 was a good movie or not, I don't remember much in that movie other than explosions started all out of nowhere and there was this big magnet thing in the end. I think I fell asleep halfway.
But anyway, let's drop all this ****. Here's the fact: adults get bored watching kids, and the people yelling for an Animorphs studio remake are adults. Most people who would actually even recognize the title "Animorphs" are adults. Kids aren't the primary audience. This makes it extremely hard to make it the way you want it to be. Remember, they have to get their money back, and this movie's production is gonna burn a hell lot of money.
KA sure showed a lot of scenes about how cruel and ugly war was. But she didn't spend a lot of time debating over how children shouldn't be forced into it. Yeah some scenes were as bloody and disgusting as Saw or Silent Hill, but that's all she wrote. She didn't spend pages and pages talking about how horrible it was that the characters were only 13-16. Not even in the Cassie books. Yeah you can argue that you felt heartbroken that a bunch of young teens were thrown so much responsibility and that they had to live with all the horror, but KA didn't really ramble over this topic that much. It was all "what had to be done had to be done". She didn't write about anybody freaking out or throwing up or crying for their mommies during/after battles. They all had this superhero attitude.
Christopher Nolan filming Bruce Wayne crippled and mentally breaking down after Rachel's death is showing the vulnerability of Batman. Just showing him battling against terrible odds with his bare hands isn't. We do know that putting a city on one man's shoulders is a hell lot of responsibility, and we do wonder how Batman manages to be that tough, but you can't say that the entire Batman franchise is written to discuss how much a man can take. I'm not saying the series didn't show the horror of war and the whole series was a rosy adventure. I'm saying that's not what it's about, and there wasn't an emphasized discussion on how bad it was that the heroes were kids instead of adults.
Oh btw I don't think it will be filmed "in the 90's" either. It's an action sci-fi. They're trying to portray cool Andalite technology. There's no reason they have to be in the 90's, when fashion was different and people listened to Backstreet Boys. Oh wait, maybe there is. Cell phones weren't around in the 90's and they had to use the family phone and talk in code... but that's not a big problem anyway. It's mainly about the war anyway, not how they had to talk in code if people tapped the phone.
So anyway, there's gonna be a lot of ways that this Animorphs movie, if ever picked up in the future, would be different from your expectations if you're expecting it to be a faithful rendition of the books. Don't get so offended. Ultimately the studio just cares about making money out of an investment
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"Adults get bored watching kids" - Pretty subjective and not really able to be substantiated. It all just depends on the characters and if they're written well. Pretty sure a bunch of adults went to see, oh, you know, ET, or Home Alone or whatever. Those types of movies aren't aimed *at* kids, it's more general.
As for the Nolan-Batman thing, Batman doesn't need to be showed cutting and slicing and biting people. He fights with his fists and with a car and various gadgets, there's no real need to have it be anything other than the usual acceptable level in blockbusters. You start showing a grizzly bear in a fight scene, or a tiger, or hell, a Hork-Bajir, basically by nature that has to be pretty visceral and barbaric just for it to not look ridiculous and laughable. Forget about the kids thing for a second, just showing an Animorphs fight scene on screen basically demands that it be quite a good deal more intense than something like The Dark Knight, if only because you couldn't take it even remotely seriously otherwise. I tend to use the "Terminator 2, without the swearing/cussing" example as what it should probably be. Not quite "hard R", but more than the usual PG-13 stuff every summer.
One thing I agree with you on is there's no way in hell a movie would ever keep the 90s setting. Only way this gets made is if they're hoping to capture a new audience, as the built-in existing base is small, so they'd go the angle of trying to capture this new gen. More reason it'd probably be all clean and glossy and slick like new action movies are, unfortunately.
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But anyway, let's drop all this ****. Here's the fact: adults get bored watching kids, and the people yelling for an Animorphs studio remake are adults. Most people who would actually even recognize the title "Animorphs" are adults. Kids aren't the primary audience. This makes it extremely hard to make it the way you want it to be. Remember, they have to get their money back, and this movie's production is gonna burn a hell lot of money.
I know for a fact that a huge chunk of the audience for the show Avatar is adult. People will like stuff that's inherently cool, regardless of whether the main cast are kids or not. Like NothingFromSomethin g said, that argument is unsubstantiated and anecdotal.
If you just advertise it as being gritty as hell, people will buy it. That's just what pop culture is like, currently. Here's a relevant podcast to listen to. http://www.cracked.com/podcast/why-our-favorite-tv-shows-are-so-bleak/ (http://www.cracked.com/podcast/why-our-favorite-tv-shows-are-so-bleak/) Very applicable to Animorphs.
KA sure showed a lot of scenes about how cruel and ugly war was. But she didn't spend a lot of time debating over how children shouldn't be forced into it. Yeah some scenes were as bloody and disgusting as Saw or Silent Hill, but that's all she wrote. She didn't spend pages and pages talking about how horrible it was that the characters were only 13-16. Not even in the Cassie books. Yeah you can argue that you felt heartbroken that a bunch of young teens were thrown so much responsibility and that they had to live with all the horror, but KA didn't really ramble over this topic that much. It was all "what had to be done had to be done". She didn't write about anybody freaking out or throwing up or crying for their mommies during/after battles. They all had this superhero attitude.
Actually, she did write about that. Quite a few times. One of the parts that sticks out most in my mind is the auxiliary animorphs' first battle, and that one paraplegic girl gets just about gutted by a hork-bajir, and she is crying and begging for her life while the other animorphs almost forget about her. She doesn't behave like you'd expect a veteran to. She acts like a kid. A terrified, bleeding, kid. You don't have to explicitly write the words, "Gee it's gosh darned awful that we're kids and not adults." That would be telling, not showing. That was pretty much the purpose of all the auxiliaries, in fact. To remind you that yes, they are kids and the original animorphs have completely forgotten that.
The way Karen acted when Aftran left her was another pretty good example. Every time someone mentioned Jake's appearance, they mentioned that he had a traumatized, stressed, "old man" sort of look in his eyes. Everyone had their own massive individual freakout or breakdown at some point or another. Rachel actually did throw up out of sheer stress at once (forget which book, but I remember it getting in her hair), and Marco implied he did too. And then there was the weird flashback with Elfangor somehow "expelling the morning's grass" in #33, which is something I really want to stop picturing now. They mention having constant nightmares related to morphing and fighting. Quite a few of the books end on someone crying and/or emotionally broken.
So no, this argument is pretty invalid.
Oh btw I don't think it will be filmed "in the 90's" either. It's an action sci-fi. They're trying to portray cool Andalite technology. There's no reason they have to be in the 90's, when fashion was different and people listened to Backstreet Boys. Oh wait, maybe there is. Cell phones weren't around in the 90's and they had to use the family phone and talk in code... but that's not a big problem anyway. It's mainly about the war anyway, not how they had to talk in code if people tapped the phone.
Yeah, they might not go that route, but I really hope they do. It's about the series' unique flavor, really, regardless of Andalite technology (which didn't actually show up all that much, apart from the Escafil device; mostly all we see is Yeerk stuff). Every decade felt different culturally, and the series would have changed radically if it were set in the '70s or '80s. The Gulf War was kind of a big background event at the time, and didn't have quite the same tone as our current Middle East conflict. The culture just felt different as a result. And heck, they would not have gotten away with any of the stuff they did in airports post 9/11. Lots of world-changing stuff happened just after the series came to an end.
Not to be rude like I'm doubting your fanhood or anything, but I get the feeling you missed a lot of the themes and subtexts on your past reads, and now you're just kind of writing it off as just a cheap kiddy action/adventure with more blood than average. It really is more than that.
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ET was kinda inevitable. They wanted to portray adults as the people who only care about science and the kids as the nice guys that would save a friend. Honestly I think that's kind of stereotyped, but movies tend to be stereotyped anyway. And Home alone's story was intentionally revolved around the kid's brilliance. People do like smart. But that's all different. The kids weren't "heroes" here. The Animorphs battles are serious. It's hard to get people to watch alien spaceships and Visser Three morph to some hideous beast in one scene and a bunch of 13 year olds in another. We're talking about X-men level battles here. People who would pay to watch that sort of stuff are usually more interested in hot, young people. They probably won't pay to watch Justin Bieber fight a morphing blue scorpion monster, you know.
I'm not saying every movie viewer's like me. And I guess some people's gonna think I suck for not taking young teens seriously. But really, think of the average person who watches action sci-fi's. Most of them would rather watch some good looking 23 year olds pretend to be in high school than a bunch of kids who probably didn't even finish elementary. (Honestly even showing high school kids is a compromise. They like buff guys and hot girls) I really can't see the studios being so loyal to the books that they risk losing hundreds of millions in the box office.
I don't think the battle scenes are that big a problem. All the animals and aliens would be CGI. People love action as long as blood isn't too heavy and organs aren't thrown around. And you probably shouldn't show limbs being cut off and used as baseball bats, but that's pretty much it. There has been so many war documentaries and very few of them are that horrible or disturbing to watch. You really have to try and work hard to make horrible, blood heavy fights. You need a lot of camera shots and editing and special effects involved to achieve that. Actually, the only films that manages to do that are the Destination finale films and stuff like that. Hunger games wasn't R and in the books it involved lots of blood, body organs, and genetically altered animals as well. So it's totally possible. And honestly people would be more interested in the transformation and the aliens anyway.
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Again, my point is the book did not discuss in particular how much worse it is that the fighters are kids instead of adults. The war was portrayed to be cruel, but I don't think KA spent much time trying to make people feel bad in particular that it's children fighting the war. Seriously I think she just picked 13 because she wanted to sell to young kids. When they relocated their parents to the hork bajir colony there wasn't some continued argument showing how protective the parents were. The governor made one appearance and that was it. The only Andalite helper was Ax, an alien kid, though over the course a bunch of Andalites came across the group. She just wanted to keep it that way so she could sell to the kids. If she really wanted to debate how the kids shouldn't be forced into it, at least the parents should have gone nuts learning how much danger their children have been through and are continuing facing. For me, that's the ultimate part that showed me "okay, I guess nobody cares that they're underage". And then Cassie's dad already knew that they were recruiting and none of the parents volunteered.
Honestly I don't see KA as a great writer and the Animorphs series as a perfect masterpiece. There were so much, so much potential in this series and she underachieved. I like the concept and the world she created, but she really didn't do much with most of the stuff she created. And then when she revisited stuff it turned out to be a disaster. I know that's mostly because of the ghosts, but even the first 25 or something of the series wasn't as well constructed as the Hunger games, let alone Harry Potter. That why I think the biggest challenge in making a movie would be the script writing, instead of the CGI. The stories were too short. And they almost always end in a "abandon mission, save our butts, bail" fashion, or the solution would be too simple. Cassie morphs skunk and sprays Visser Three for the victory... Yes I do take it as a children's adventure book. I don't think it's an insult that I do. I'm not gonna learn life lessons from Harry Potter either, so what? It's just entertainment to me. It's not my bible. Yes I do think of these series sometimes, but I'm not gonna elevate any of them to a Shakespeare masterpiece and go up to JK Rowling someday crying about how she inspired my life.
Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see it on the big screen, but you guys are having unrealistic expectations. I get it, you're die-hard fans, but for the studio to take the series and make it into a movie, it has to be profitable, and that's pretty much the only thing that counts. People aren't going to cater to the fans' needs to keep it faithful to the original if it sacrifices a bigger audience. Does anybody know the movie "I am number four"? It never got a sequel.
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Again, my point is the book did not discuss in particular how much worse it is that the fighters are kids instead of adults. The war was portrayed to be cruel, but I don't think KA spent much time trying to make people feel bad in particular that it's children fighting the war. Seriously I think she just picked 13 because she wanted to sell to young kids. When they relocated their parents to the hork bajir colony there wasn't some continued argument showing how protective the parents were. The governor made one appearance and that was it. The only Andalite helper was Ax, an alien kid, though over the course a bunch of Andalites came across the group. She just wanted to keep it that way so she could sell to the kids. If she really wanted to debate how the kids shouldn't be forced into it, at least the parents should have gone nuts learning how much danger their children have been through and are continuing facing. For me, that's the ultimate part that showed me "okay, I guess nobody cares that they're underage". And then Cassie's dad already knew that they were recruiting and none of the parents volunteered.
My dad had stepped forward out of the shadows. “I couldn’t sleep so I got up to get some air,” he said. “And I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation.”
His face was gaunt and haggard in the predawn light. He seemed to have aged ten years in the last twenty-four hours.
Dad looked at me for a long time. I can’t bear to describe the expression on his face.
He was looking at me like I was the enemy. Like he suddenly understood that evil existed not just in the world, not just in his own backyard, but in his very own kid. His very own flesh and blood.
“Please tell me I misunderstood,” he said. “Please tell me you haven’t actually convinced disabled children to participate in this nightmare.”
Jake spoke. “We had no choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” my father said angrily. “Jake, I thought you knew that. Where’s the boy I used to know? The boy who was so clear on right and wrong.”
I wondered the same thing.
Jake wasn’t Jake anymore. His eyes were harder. Maybe his heart, too. And I didn’t like the look that came over his face now.
It was the look that Rachel got when she was determined to win no matter what. It was the look Tobias got when he was closing in on a mouse.
“We’ll wait for you over there,” Jake told me. He didn’t answer my father. He just led Toby and the others away.
Even Jake’s back looked different. Straighter. More unyielding.
Jake, the Jake I knew, was going away. And I didn’t know how to get him back. Yet I still felt I had to defend him.
“Dad,” I said. “I don’t have time to argue ethics with you. I don’t have time to convince you that sometimes you have to do something—uncomfortable—to make things right in the end. This is war. Every minute counts. We’re fighting to save the human race.”
“The human race?” my father repeated. “Okay, answer me this, Cassie. Is what you’re doing with these disabled children humane?”
My father sounded like me.
Like the old me.
But I wasn’t that nai?ve person anymore.
I had no answer.
The thing is, how much can you actually say about it? This is really more of an issue that has to be shown for the horror to sink in. You can say the concept of a child soldier is horrible all you want, but it's not really going to mean much until you see a video of some kid in Africa with an AK-47, being told to execute a kid his age for some warlord or he gets mutilated as punishment. Animorphs showed a lot. It didn't really have to tell.
Honestly I don't see KA as a great writer and the Animorphs series as a perfect masterpiece. There were so much, so much potential in this series and she underachieved. I like the concept and the world she created, but she really didn't do much with most of the stuff she created. And then when she revisited stuff it turned out to be a disaster. I know that's mostly because of the ghosts, but even the first 25 or something of the series wasn't as well constructed as the Hunger games, let alone Harry Potter. That why I think the biggest challenge in making a movie would be the script writing, instead of the CGI. The stories were too short. And they almost always end in a "abandon mission, save our butts, bail" fashion, or the solution would be too simple. Cassie morphs skunk and sprays Visser Three for the victory... Yes I do take it as a children's adventure book. I don't think it's an insult that I do. I'm not gonna learn life lessons from Harry Potter either, so what? It's just entertainment to me. It's not my bible. Yes I do think of these series sometimes, but I'm not gonna elevate any of them to a Shakespeare masterpiece and go up to JK Rowling someday crying about how she inspired my life.
Okay, that's not really what I'm saying. I agree with this completely. KA is not the best writer in the world, Animorphs is not a masterpiece, and it's probably not even her best material. I'll be honest, a fair amount of the time I spent reading the series was thinking of how I'd slightly tweak dialogue to make it work better as a screenplay. You can't blame the ghostwriters too much, apart from that one vegan lady. Some of my favorite episodes were ghostwritten. Thing is, KA would usually give them fairly strict outlines to follow for the stories. And, she wrote the Helmacrons and did that starfish episode, along with that skunk thing. Eek. Yeah.
If you want to know who I mostly blame for the series' failings, I'd have to say the Scholastic executives. If she weren't pressured to put out a whole book per month, while working on two other separate series, while having a baby, she probably would have had more of a chance to put some more thought into the course of the story, and wouldn't have had to hire ghostwriters or fall back on silly filler as often.
So I'm not saying that the series changed my life, that it's like my bible, or even that I'm a die-hard fan or anything like that. When it comes down to it, the reason I like it is because (my slight furry tendencies aside), the series was filled with some amazingly powerful moments where it could have easily been a completely vapid cliche teen drama or pure mindless gung-ho action. And it's a hell of an interesting universe, to boot.
The length of the stories is actually part of what I think makes it ideal for a TV show. Pretty much all of them could easily fit into a one-hour episode. If you did it as a movie, you'd have to start mashing books together, and that would mean some awkward arc-juggling, and yeah. It would turn into the A Series of Unfortunate Events movie. The fact that they so rarely actually win any battles was an intentional choice to maintain a certain tone, and it would work better in an extended format. TV show's the way to go, I think.
I only added the "I don't mean to be rude" part because some people do get upset if they feel you're suggesting that they're not a true fan of whatever the conversation is about. So yeah. Never mind that then. *shrug*
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Alright I'm not gonna argue on the kids thing anymore. I still don't think it serves any more purpose than alluring to the kids. It could have easily been high school kids, college kids... and there wouldn't have been much difference, apart from maybe their math homework would be econ papers instead.
I do agree that Animorphs had a solid foundation - one of the best of its genre. That's the main reason the series was successful. It's so cool. But it fell short of what it could have been. There are lots of people you could blame, but they still made an awesome world and ideas are worth money and production and movies. Just that the scriptwriters would need to revise the stories to make something worth the investment.
Yeah I do know that you can't expect to pick up the morphing cube one day, and overthrow the yeerk empire on the next. I've been following a Japanese cartoon called Detective Conan around the same time I started reading Animorphs, and they still haven't finished the series. I think the series is almost 20 years old, and I don't mind. They're still gathering pieces and breaking cases along the way. The thing is, most of the Animorphs missions seemed too irrelevant, or meaningless, or so suicidal that they had to bail as soon as they started working on it. They rarely ever executed through, and most of the times their "successful" missions would look so easy it's like one of the bed time stories you tell 3 year olds. That's really not a captive plot for an action movie, you know.
I do think TV's a better format for the current version of scripts we have for Animorphs, but the budget is SKY HIGH. I'm skeptical about how cheap (both in terms of money and time) CGI can get even in the future. You still need to hire experienced computer scientists and artists and make them work overtime and buy lots of equipment. I do expect to see a CGI tiger as good as the one in Life of Pi, and I do hope the Andalites look equally convincing, like what they did for Avatar. I know morphing is written to be 1-2 minutes long but it's on TV/the big screen so it'll be done in 10 seconds max. I do expect the morphing to beat Peter Petrigrew changing to rat in Harry Potter 3. And I do want to see Blade ships and Pool ships that actually look convincing, like Star Wars stuff. All these movies had 100+M budgets. Avatar had 240M. The production for Animorphs would easily go 150+M if you want to do it justice. You only have that luxury for block buster action films. The average TV show don't have tens of millions to burn for each episode. Game of thrones averages 6M (that's a huge number for TV shows) and even they don't have the luxury to do epic scenes all the time.