Day 8: Opinion on the TV series
J.R.R. Tolkien said it better than I could have: unless you’ve got the necessary special effects to convince viewers that they are literally watching a literal film of the actual events described in the story playing out on screen, don’t try to make a movie or show of it. You’re already asking your audience to suspend disbelief about the existence of fairies (or, in this case, aliens), on top of the usual suspension of disbelief that comes from reading a fictional story at all. Asking them to squint at stuffed skunks and Eveready flashlights and see morphing power and dracon beams is a step too far. The story doesn’t get told the way it was meant to.
So yeah, I hate the TV series, but most of the reasons I hate it come straight from the lack of budget: the way-too-old actors, the extremely sparse use of the single hork-bajir puppet, the tendency for both Ax and Visser Three to spend a suspicious amount of time in human morph, the crappy floating shots of Jake talking to Temrash 114, the crappy slapdash writing style, the terrible untalented extras, the fact that the Animorphs pretty much never use their battle morphs to actually do battle, the fact that the “no morphing humans” rule gets thrown out the window, the fact that the yeerks are literal slugs, and the not-remotely-frightening dracon beams. All of those can all be chalked up insufficient funding. So those issues aren’t really any single person’s fault.
That said, I’d love to see an animated series of the show. Especially an anime series: the teen protagonists, long transformation sequences, scream-all-you-want villains, and non-humanoid aliens would all lend themselves to an anime. The way that the book series is structured practically begs for a TV show: with a structure like Avatar the Last Airbender (three seasons, twenty-odd episodes a season) they could cover the entire series, species chronicles and all.
Just… not what we actually got.
One aspect of the TV show that I can’t blame on budget that I do really hate is the oversimplification of the books’ morality. It is extremely possible to have a children’s show with the kind of complex and disturbing grey-and-black morality that Animorphs has (again I point to Avatar), but the TV show really really doesn’t. Visser Three is the raging cartoon villain who exists solely to be put in his place by the protagonists. The controllers are portrayed as evil evil evil, with no sympathy for their trapped hosts or for the yeerks who got dragged into the war but might not want to be there. The Animorphs don’t argue about the morality of dropping oatmeal into the yeerk pool and dooming hundreds of hosts to entrapment and insanity; they just do it. We see them tearing apart, driving over, and killing human-controllers and at the end of the day the morality is just “die, yeerks, die!” The entire heart and soul and greatness of the book series comes from its brutal deconstruction of the idea of teenage superheroes, and the show completely loses that in translation.
Okay, a couple moments of the show that I do really like:
The shot of Tom’s right hand starting to shake just after he hangs up the phone when Jake tells him not to stop fighting
The fact that Homer plays a sort of Because of Winn-Dixie type role by being the agent of the meeting between Elfangor and the kids, thereby setting up the implication that the Ellimist was responsible for him suddenly deciding to run off and go bark at a spaceship
The scene with Rachel letting Jordan have the necklace they used to fight over because of some combination of (a) petty fights don’t matter as much in light of the war and (b) I want to be closer to my sister in light of the war © nothing at all matters anymore in light of the war
The bizarrely homoerotic sequence where Jake very slowly places a slippery, phallic, glistening piece of escargot in his mouth while eyefucking Visser Three across the table
The fact that Tobias’s wardrobe is Greaser with a Goth edge in contrast to everyone else’s 90s-pastel-chic and/or SoCal-dudebro look, which keeps his air of being The Weird Kid but also gives him a wrong-side-of-the-tracks John Bender type vibe
Okay, that’s it, there is nothing else redeeming about this show
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