Meh. I wouldn't bat an eye if they through out most of the darkness and underlying messages. Heck, I didn't even take much notice of it before coming to this site. I wouldn't miss a thing. Make it more like Avatar, except with aliens and morphing instead of elemental attacks and martial arts.
My maturity level is not very high. Certainly not enough to get in the way of kiddifying Animorphs.
If you take away most of the fighting (i.e. childproof it) and the messages and the darkness you're left with what? The TV series, random dribble about high schoolers who can turn into animals but usually don't for some reason, playing pranks on aliens who don't seem to realize what it means to be "in character" as opposed to fighting them like they're supposed to.
Animorphs and Avatar aren't as dissimilar as you might think. Avatar had its darkness and underlying nonsense too, I mean Aang pretty much does nothing to prevent his girlfriend from setting off to commit a murder, Azula is a freakin' psychopath and Suki's sneaking into a boy's tent in the middle of the night for "unknown" purposes, the series was actually fairly dark and grown up for a kid's series, much like Animorphs.
That's why it was good.While Avatar wasn't exactly kiddy sunshine funtime hour it didn't let the war get it down like Animorphs did, the kids never stopped being kids . . . but there is a very good reason for that beyond it simply being a kids show . . .
The reason is the gAang weren't
fighting the war, the soldiers and armies were fighting the war. Avatar could have a war without the children being soldiers (Except Suki, and even then its implied that she was given grunt work as opposed to actual combat duty) because there were other people to fight the war, entire armies in fact. In Animorphs Jake is the general, the others are his army, and that's pretty much it, there was no one else around to fight the war, the two stranded Andalites on earth didn't even contribute to the war, didn't offer any real help, at no point did the Animorphs find someone who would fight the war for them while they focused on just being kids, towards the end they got reinforcements but the burden was still on them. You can't make Animorphs like Avatar without first providing a way for it to
be like Avatar, Avatar had adults shielding the kids, in Animorphs the kids pretty much had to band together to shield each other, this is why Animorphs is somewhat darker than Avatar, and more violent.
To change all that in order to make the movie marketable to children would be to completely rewrite the whole series, Animorphs doesn't need to be like
300 with violence left and right, but it most definitely doesn't need to be like
Troy, utterly changing, rearranging, and in place of the profanity I wanted to use I'll just say "lying" about a story so that it's nothing like the actual tale . . . I mean except that there's some adulterous chick named Helen that every guy wants, and a city with some walls.
