Animorphs Movie

[NickDaGriff]

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. 

Haven't seen Super 8 yet, but it is on my long and ever-expanding To Watch/Read list.

[NothingFromSomething]

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.

[cathey]

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

[NothingFromSomething]

"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.

[NickDaGriff]

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/  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.

[cathey]

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.

[cathey]

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.

[NickDaGriff]

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*

[cathey]

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.