Assuming that I don't get a new cast, a bigger budget, a longer timeline, or access to a ton of exotic animals, I think what I'd change in a remade Animorphs show comes down to one thing...
What I'd Change from AniTV: Editing.
This is a little harder to convey with just screenshots, but: the framing of shots, and the way they're put together, is easily the weakest part of the show. The writing is actually quite good in many places. The camera work has its moments. The storylines show a clear love for the books, and their biggest constraint seems to be budget. The acting varies, but most of the controller-actors are great. It's often funny, often scary, often sad, often heartbreakingly true to the books (Rachel longing to go to a school dance with Tobias), often delightfully original when it departs (Jake escargot scene, anyone?).
But the editing. Holy MOLY. Every episode comes off like they shot only half the footage they need, and then tried to stretch it into 30 minutes by showing some things way too fast, some things waaaay toooo slooooow, and some things not at all.
Like, take "My Name is Erek" (S2E2). The writing shows actual efforts to capture the characters and tone of the book, within a super-limited budget. We open in Marco having a nightmare about a hork-bajir, only to jerk awake and reveal he dozed off in Cassie's barn while watching Ax attempt to teach himself to cook. There's a bit with Ax cooking based only on the vague vibes he's gotten from TV, free from constraints like human stomach capacity or fatal food poisoning, and then Marco and Jake morph mice to sneak into a Sharing meeting.
Marco gets caught by a custodian and thrown away, Jake has to get him out of a dumpster, and then they see...
A dog standing in the road, and a car about half a mile away from said dog. There is fully time for Marco to announce there's a dog about to be hit by a car, and for Jake to say "oh no," as they slowly watch this disaster unfold and wish they had some popcorn right now:
And then they're like, "oh good, that kid is going to do something about it," which Erek does, again veeeery sllloooowly:
And like, I cannot emphasize enough how many times we cut back to Marco and Jake in the middle of this, or how it takes like a solid 30 seconds for them to go "Huh, a dog. Guess that dog's going to die. Shame. I wish there was something we could do, but since we are so very far away from this dog we can't help her. Oh look, there's Erek King. I guess he's... Oh huh, he's hugging the dog? Oh gosh, that's nice, at least they'll both get a hug in the time it takes for that car to get here... Maybe they should move at some point? Because that car's a little closer now...."
And then, approximately 0.0001 seconds after the reveal that holy crap, Erek King just Edward Cullened that dog, we cut to Cassie and Rachel sipping smoothies and talking about how they came to the mall to get machine parts for Ax.
From there we spend the rest of the episode on a discussion of who Erek is and who the chee are, and we never return to that mission Jake and Marco were in the middle of when the episode opened.
Like, there's so much potential here! Having Jake and Marco be in the middle of an unrelated mission when they witness Erek do something impossible — cool idea. Having it be dog-related — you read the books! you understand the character! Having this opening on an unrelated mission that takes a sudden left turn when they see Erek being all chee — makes sense. Most of the character beats are also either on point (Rachel dragging Cassie to the mall, Marco making jokes about how real superheroes don't get thrown in dumpsters) or else extrapolations that feel like they love and understand the books (Ax's weird food thing + Ax's weird TV thing = Ax trying to be Julia Child by dry-boiling four cucumbers and a shoe). But it's so so SO clumsily edited that the end result verges on being unwatchable.
Honestly, part of why I want a new edit more than anything is that this feels achievable. An amateur like me could even take the existing footage exactly as it is, and — with more time than I have for this project, sadly — re-edit it into two or three really strong episodes that grab all the best moments of dialogue and character work, and turn them into a banger-ass Animorphs adaptation without having to add anything else to the project. But yeeeaaaaah, basically every shot would have to be re-ordered or re-framed to make everything from tension-building to literal plot points come off correctly.
