Notice: I slowed my reading for the second two-thirds of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, so in the meantime you get my musings on a Young Adult series from my childhood that I finally finished last year. I still hope to finish Verne’s novel today or tomorrow and post a review shortly, but I’ve been itching to write this post for a while, and now seemed as good a time as any.
I have an irrational love of the Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate. For those who don’t know, Animorphs is about a group of middle school aged kids who fight off a covert alien invasion with the power to transform into any animal whose DNA they’ve “acquired.”
Growing up, I never managed to finish them, so last year I decided to reread everything I had already read and then carry on to finish the series. It was enjoyable, nostalgic, and a little bit unsettling. On the one hand, I still really really enjoyed the world that Applegate created. On the other, I noticed a lot of flaws of which I had previously been unaware. It’s almost as if Applegate had an unnatural gift for thinking of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” scenarios, but a corresponding deficit when it came to internal consistency, continuity, and comparative animal anatomy.
This last issue—comparative anatomy—is probably my single biggest gripe with the series. Applegate claims that she wrote the books we can intent of getting kids interested in animals and science. However, whenever she has the Animorphs morph into digitigrade animals, they talk about their knees reversing directions. This is idiotic, as the animals’ “knees” are actually analogous to the human heel, and they have actual knees (complete with kneecaps!) higher in the leg, obscured by their haunches. Sure, morphing is described as “inconsistent” and “random,” but this mode of transformation happens consistently. If occasionally their human legs dissolved entirely before their wolf legs grew to replace them, or some other equally divergent metamorphosis took place, I would be more willing to accept this inefficient transformation, but lacking such evidence, I can only conclude Applegate committed the common blunder of assuming the animals’ heels were their knees.
Even so, I forgive this bizarre choice or careless mistake—whichever it may be—for the series that took me through so many crises and triumphs. It’s funny to think that when I first started the series, the protagonists seemed so mature. Sure, they called themselves kids at every available opportunity (stressing their youth and inexperience), but I was just a kid too. Then, I started rereading the books last year, roughly twice the age of the same characters. Suffice to say, it was a different experience. Although, I couldn’t bring myself to picture the characters as anything younger than 16, despite all evidence and assurances to the contrary. Make of that what you will.
Something I was never aware of as a child, or that I had forgotten, was my preference for certain narrators in the series over others. I preferred Tobias and Jake most of all, I think. Rachel and Ax filled the middling level of my preference, while I was out right annoyed with most books narrated by either Marco or Cassie. Marco, despite my having more in common with him than any of the others, because his humor gets very repetitive when you’re actually inside his head. Cassie, because I get really annoyed with her politics. Of course, there are some books with each that I really enjoy all the same, but trends do tend to emerge.
There is a part of me—a very very small part, mind you—that even now contemplates writing my own version of the Animorphs. I would do away with some of my pet peeves, alter the characters slightly, and include a LOT less time travel. I can’t decide whether I would try to modernize the series, or leave it in the time period in which it was written. The main difference would be the ubiquity of cell phones, even among adolescents, and how this would affect the first contact between the Animorphs and the alien who gave them their morphing power.
If you haven’t ever read the Animorphs series, I highly recommend it. Read the first five books: they only take a couple hours each to read, and should give you a decent idea of whether or not you’ll enjoy the series as a whole.
William Cady Likes to Read 