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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 5 years

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We all know a tv show would be preferable to a movie (or do we?), but if Animorphs were to be adapted in to a movie series, how would you break up the books? Which ones would become films, would any be combined, would you make any composite characters?

I’d vote for a show over a movie series, but if I had to have a movie series, it’d ideally go something like this:

Animorphs: The Invasion

Goes through the events of the first book, with a handful of additions:

Have one scene or sequence with the Animorphs each saying goodbye to their families before leaving to fight the first battle (similar to AniTV)

Establish both major romances of the series right off the bat, maybe through having Jake and Cassie be a couple already and then building Rachel and Tobias up to a pre-battle kiss

Briefly go through the events of #3 and #4 in the last few scenes by showing some kind of montage of Tobias adjusting to hawk life and then, at the very end, have him go discuss weird dreams with Cassie

Last shot of the movie: pan down to Dome ship at the bottom of the ocean, show Ax using mirrorwave whatsits to call for help

But-wait-there’s-more: a post-credits scene establishes that Visser Three is getting Ax’s messages too

Animorphs: The Message

Goes through the events of #4 and #13, with flashbacks to The Andalite Chronicles:

Open mid-battle (possibly the water truck battle from #3) to establish that it’s been a few weeks since the first movie

Have Cassie talk the other Animorphs into “one more attempt” to go rescue Ax, followed by the (somewhat abridged) events of #4, probably sans talking whales because that just won’t translate well

Ax and Tobias almost immediately begin their attempt to have “E.T. phone home” from #8, and in the process discover andalite tech that contains Elfangor’s hirac dilest

Have Ax learn the location of the morphing cube from Elfangor’s hirac dilest, along with some engineering knowledge that gives Tobias’s morphing power back (again, sort of like AniTV)

Have Ax and Tobias discover Jara and Ket mid-escape and try to help, leading to a simplified version of #13; leave out the Ellimist because he’s too dang complicated

All Animorphs help to get Jara and Ket to safety, after which Jara explains that the Yeerk Peace Movement helped them escape

Post-credits scene: Tobias flies to unknown neighborhood, sits on roof until an adult Loren comes out of the house across the way

Animorphs: The Answer pt. 1

Goes through the events of #41 - #50, extremely abridged:

Open with the sequence from #41 with the end of the battle followed by Jake going home, again to help establish that it’s been a while since the events of the last movie (and to remind us that Tom exists)

As Jake is checking in at his house, have Cassie checking in with the YPM, Tobias checking in with Loren at the hork-bajir valley, and Ax intercepting a yeerk transmission indicating that open war is imminent

Finally, cut to Rachel and Marco showing up at a hospital, where they recruit James et al.

At the school for the blind, Tobias spots a Sharing Relief Services van out front; he warns the others in time, but they end up leaving the cube with one of the blind kids they came to recruit in their haste to retreat

Jake sees Tom getting in the van with the morphing cube, grabs a dracon beam and is about to shoot him; Cassie yells Jake’s name in an effort to stop him, and Tom turns around and sees them both as humans

There’s a big final battle, a random YPM member saves Jake from Visser Three, but the yeerks get the morphing cube anyway

Throughout the battle, it’s extremely obvious the whole time that the Animorphs’ cover is blown

Post-credits scene: Tom’s yeerk is watching Jake’s parents infested, and then walks out of the room, morphs a bird, and flies away

Animorphs: The Answer pt. 2

Covers (some of) the events of #52 - #54:

Open on the scene with Jake and Tobias floating over their town looking at the destruction, including the mass infestations happening below

The Animorphs go through their plan to blow up the yeerk pool, only Jake/Rachel/Tobias are on a separate mission with the Auximorphs to attack the taxxons at the same time that Ax/Marco/Cassie are delivering the train car

Jake falls through a hole, everyone assumes he died, and they all go back to the hork-bajir valley where “war council” scene occurs and includes a discussion of James taking over as leader

Cut to the taxxon tunnels with the big reveal that Jake survived, and he’s currently negotiating with Arbron and Tom’s yeerk about how to take down Visser Three

The final battle plays out almost the same way, although with the YPM playing the role that the chee did in the books, including a rebel yeerk draining the Pool ship’s guns in revenge after finding out Jake dumped the yeerk pool

End on Cassie voiceover, starting with her talking at Rachel’s funeral and fading into her talking about what the other four survivors did over the next few years

Post-credits scene: Ax finds the Blade ship, gets sucked into some kind of eldritch abomination as Menderash watches on the viewscreen

A few notes on my thought process:

Many of the elements I’d leave out are those that would be difficult or impossible to convey quickly with the hyper-simplified format of movies. These include: the Ellimist and Crayak, gedds, skrit na, Eva and Edriss, Erek and the other chee, most andalite politics, the Chapman family, most yeerk hosts, Aldrea and Dak, and Aftran.

Similarly, many of the elements I’d emphasize — romances, battle sequences, flashbacks, family dramas — are the ones that would probably translate well to film.

After all that, I’d make the movies YA and PG-13.

The higher rating would allow more of the books’ violence, gore, body horror, predation, and moral greyness to remain in the movies.

A YA movie would be allowed to have the complexity I’d want from the plot to avoid it becoming a good vs. evil story.

It’d ideally be marketed toward the Shadowhunters/ Hunger Games/ Divergent audience, not the Goosebumps/ Pokemon/ Spiderwick Chronicles audience.

It’s a better idea to cast actors in their late teens or early 20s (much as I hate this) to avoid continuity errors around one’s cast going through puberty between shoots.

Do the classic YA-film-series money grab gambit by having a four-movie trilogy, which is one extra movie.

Emphasize the YPM and rebel taxxons, because those elements help set Animorphs apart from being an oversimplified war movie with black-and-white morality.

Keep the spandex costumes, but make them deliberately ugly and dorky to avoid sexualizing the child protagonists.

#animorphs #animorphs meta #animorphs movies #long post #movie plotting #the books would still be better #unculturedmamoswine #asks #anitv #movie

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lilacsolanum · 7 years

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Ever since I reread The Andalite Chronicles I can't stop thinking of an Animorphs AU set in the 1970s with Loren, Elfangor, Eva, Naomi, Chapman, and idk. Crazy Helen. Do these ages match up? I don't think so. Locations don’t either. Who cares. I don't.

Elfangor and Eva act as co-leaders and often times feel like parents on the brink of divorce, but they always manage to set aside their egos in the nick of time and come up with a life saving plan. Elfangor misses his homeworld but is so deeply in love with both Earth and Loren he never seems to mind being stuck on Earth. He has a scoop in the forest but he spends most of his time morphed as human and following Loren everywhere. He gets trapped as human at one point, on purpose, for Loren, jeopardizing the entire Yeerk resistance, but the Ellimist sets him back. Eva will never forget or forgive his recklessness and brings it up constantly, at the worst times, leading to loud shouting matches and compromised missions.

Eva learned English as a kid from watching Johnny Carson (the days Joan Rivers was on were her favorite.) She moved to Santa Barbara to attend UCSB at seventeen on scholarship, due to skipping grades and hard work. She's not exactly a class clown, but she has a dry wit that she employs during class discussions that make everyone laugh. Fighting the Yeerks exhausts her, but she still manages to turn in every essay and ace every exam. She will defeat the Yeerks, she will get her degree, and she will give her mother a better life. These are foregone conclusions according to Eva. In the end, she achieves all of that, and more.

Naomi was supposed to marry rich. That was her whole thing. She was supposed to be very beautiful and very fashionable and very demure and she was supposed to snag a rich man. She went to college for her MRS degree, initially planning on going through the motions of a law degree like her father until she found her man, but she ended up taking her classes VERY seriously. So seriously the boys in her classes started calling her The Queen. She loved it. She takes her skill with arguing and logic to the war. She grilled Elfangor about Andalite culture until she learned all he knew, and now she acts as the Animorph's voice when speaking to the Yeerks. She still wants to marry rich. She has her eyes on the Berenson boys across town. She wants Steve, but any will do.

Loren adjusts to the life of a child soldier almost immediately. It's almost scary how well she takes to it. She's reckless and dangerous and that makes Elfangor reckless and dangerous, because he's madly in love with her and what small ability he has to keep a cool head go out the door when Loren is involved. She doesn't attend UCSB but she has a part time job at a skate rink. She spends her free time protesting; against the Vietnam War, against racism, for women's rights. The world is unfair and Loren wants to make it better. She cooks up crazy schemes and always ropes Elfangor into them, much to Eva's chagrin. The tension between Eva and Loren is palpable (and maybe sexual). One day, Loren freed a ton of lab animals that completely destroyed important and helpful disease research. It was the worst fight Eva and Loren ever had. Elfangor had to lie down for a very long time.

No one has idea why Chapman fights. Sometimes, he feels like a real member of the team. Sometimes, he's got their back. But then things get a little too real for Chapman and his volatile sense of self preservation kicks in and he nearly gets everyone else killed. There was a moment, when everything was fresh and new, when Chapman almost sold out the Animorphs. It was only Naomi's eloquence and rhetoric that saved the day. After that mission, Elfangor told Chapman that if he pulled anything like that again, Elfangor would personally end his life. Chapman sneered and said Elfangor didn't have the balls. Eva stepped up, holding a knife, and said "I do," in a smooth and silky voice. She swung her knife in one wide and sure arc, slicing Chapman's throat. It was shallow enough that he had time to morph and remorph. He was never out of line again. Loren asked Eva just how Eva had known how to make the cut to give Chapman time to save himself. Eva was silent. She hadn't known.

And like to make the parallels I need a forth woman. Crazy Helen is an estreen. She spends most of her time being a horse. She makes people call her Crazy Helen even as a teen. She thinks the battles are super fun. Honestly she's having such a great time. Crazy Helen survives the war and gets her own morning talk show. She has her own perfume line. No one knows why she decided to do that, but honestly the scents are pretty nice.

#house berenson #why did eva have that knife #i don't know #don't worry about it #it's a cool moment #shut up #I will never write this #animorphs #animorphs meta

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years

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Am I the only one who always headcanoned that Tobias is the Ellimist?

Because I’ve always headcanoned that Tobias is the Ellimist.

This idea originated when I was rereading The Andalite Chronicles and this one passage near the end stuck out to me. Elfangor and Loren are standing over the Time Matrix, and he tells her to

«Imagine your Earth, your home just as it is today... We need to go back in time. Back before your mother would have noticed you missing. But not before the Skrit Na took you or we would undo this entire timeline... Imagine that you are eighteen and that everyone who has ever know you expects you to be eighteen.»

“Is this really going to work?”

«I don’t know.»

—The Andalite Chronicles p. 399

That’s right, sports fans: Elfangor and Loren created the universe. At the very least, they created the universe in which the entire Animorphs series takes place. They deliberately manufacture a time paradox—one in which Loren is simultaneously on Earth (so no one notices she’s gone) and bopping around the galaxy with Elfangor (to preserve the loop that created the paradox in the first place) for over two months. One needs no further proof of the resultant universe’s impossibility than the fact that Chapman appears back on Earth after having been kidnapped and then killed, and yet he would have had to have died in order for Loren to create that Earth for him to return to in the first place.

It’s also left ambiguous as to whether Chapman remembers being that alternate version of himself the way that Loren does. He claims not to know her or Esplin 9466, yes, but they also don’t exactly hook him up to a polygraph to check—and he is a known liar. It might even be possible that Loren makes herself forget all aliens, several years down the line... We see subconscious longings and urges drive the will of the Time Matrix almost as much as conscious desires do (Loren perceiving the McDonald’s cashier as a face without eyes, Elfangor making his soul-tree the center of his universe, Esplin 9466 conjuring creatures that a yeerk fears to use as weapons), so it’s possible that she however-accidentally built a reset button into her conception of the universe, such that she was always going to forget all about aliens the moment Elfangor was gone from her life.

But I digress. The point is: the Time Matrix is a literally omnipotent object, and the people who attempt to use it inevitably make some mistakes and have some unintended consequences. Just look at Visser Four accidentally erasing Albert Einstein from existence.

So what does this have to do with the Ellimist? Well, I think Elfangor (and to some extent Loren) created him.

In the chronology of the Animorphs series, there is no hard evidence of the Ellimist’s existence (or non-existence, for that matter) before Elfangor and Loren use the Time Matrix for the first time. He makes no appearance in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles or Visser, and his own Ellimist Chronicles might be retrospective only for reasons I’ll get to later. So then the Ellimist’s first appearance comes just as Elfangor makes contact with the Time Matrix, as “a being like nothing I could have imagined. It saw me. It saw us all. And it laughed” (Andalite Chronicles).

What’s interesting is that there are apparently multiple opinions about the existence of the Ellimist(s) before this moment. When Elfangor suggests that the Ellimist(s) created the Time Matrix, both Alloran and Arbron dismiss this belief as an outdated fairy story. Apparently only some of the andalites believe that the Ellimist exists, and even that belief is not regarded as being particularly plausible or normative. Furthermore, those who do believe in the Ellimists seem to think there are several, and yet we know that there is only one.

So what if the Ellimist in fact doesn’t exist... until Elfangor creates him?

We know from the mashup of realities that results immediately afterward that the Time Matrix is an incredibly powerful object, one that can not only create entire universes but can change the laws of physics, chemistry, and quantum mechanics to suit the desires of the user. We also know that the Ellimist we see in reality does not quite match the stories of the Ellimists that Elfangor mentions: there’s only one of him, after all, he does not in fact create the Time Matrix that we know about, and he’s not willing to gift the andalites anything they can’t make themselves. In fact, the Time Matrix is quite possibly more powerful than either the Ellimist or Crayak, given that neither of them shows the ability to change the past and yet it can. Therefore, IMHO it’s less likely that the Ellimist created the Time Matrix, and more likely that the Time Matrix created the Ellimist.

We know that these kinds of paradoxes (i.e. Elfangor creating a being who has then been there all along) are possible using the Time Matrix (MM3). Thanks to whacky time travel in this series, Jake dies before he is ever born, John Berryman is never born at all thanks to a string of events that require John Berryman to have been born in order to exist (MM3), the Animorphs being present to save the Meercora from the comet nullified the effect of the Animorphs being present to save the Meercora from the comet (MM2), and Jake literally exists in two places at once for a while before once again kicking the bucket (#11). (Apparently, time travel does not agree with him.) So it is very possible that the Ellimist doesn’t exist until Elfangor wills him into being, but that once he’s there he has always been there. Because the Time Matrix is literally omnipotent like that.

Assuming that the Ellimist only came into being in that moment, his backstory then comes into existence because it’s what Elfangor imagines for him (Ellimist Chronicles). In the instant where the Ellimist first appears, Elfangor is alone, cut off from his species, in love with someone he can’t be with, and forced to learn to adapt to living on his own. He is literally being sucked to his death through the void of space after having been taught an excruciatingly powerful lesson in the dangers of making short-sighted decisions (Andalite Chronicles). Ergo, the life history his subconscious creates for the Ellimist not only populates in these elements, it also nicely explains why he has heard so many stories of this all-powerful being: it casts the Ellimist as the creator of the andalites.

The andalites only exist because they were created by the Ellimist, who only exists because he was created by an andalite. John Berryman’s parents only never meet because Cassie intervenes because John Berryman gets infested by Visser Four which is only possible because John Berryman’s parents met and gave birth to him.

Anyway, all of that got me thinking: maybe the Ellimist wasn’t Elfangor and Loren’s only creation.

Then again, maybe he was.

Going beyond the fact that the Ellimist talks to Tobias more than any other Animorph, there are some interesting parallels between them. They have pretty literally the same perspective on the events of the series: Tobias describes seeing humans as “hair ovals” and feeling as though he loses a dimension or two any time he’s on the ground (#23), whereas the Ellimist is described as a three-dimensional person talking to stick figures (Andalite Chronicles). When talking with the Ellimist, Tobias perceives himself as a mixture of human and bird parts (#13); when manifesting himself, the Ellimist imagines himself in his original Ketran body which is comprised of human-like and bird-like body parts (Ellimist Chronicles).

However, both of them work hard to transcend their original bodies: Tobias deliberately becomes a nothlit to escape his human life, and the Ellimist allows his original Ketran body to fall into a black hole in order to transcend physical life and achieve a new form of being. The Ellimist repeatedly mentions that Rachel is his favorite Animorph; if you have any question at all about who Tobias’s favorite Animorph is then you’re clearly reading a different book series than I am. In fact, Rachel herself describes the Ellimist as being “just a kid like me” after seeing his life—maybe she’s being more literal than we realize (#54). The hork-bajir view Tobias as a messiah figure; the andalites have the same perspective on the Ellimist. Toomin is “unique to the universe” (Ellimist Chronicles); Tobias is “one of a kind” (MM3).

Maybe the parallels exist because they’re the same person. Maybe this is who Tobias is destined to become after he dies. Maybe the One absorbs Tobias at the end of the series, and Tobias survives after a fashion to do battle with the One. Maybe Tobias escapes the One with music and sadness and mourning for his lost people. Maybe Tobias then achieves a higher form of being, one that enables him to go back and ensure his own existence.

If that’s the case, then the Ellimist never breaks the rules of his and Crayak’s game. He just defends his own life.

Chronologically, the Ellimist’s first major intervention in the time stream is simultaneously pulling Elfangor out of his vacation on Earth and ensuring that Tobias survives the change. It should break the rules of his and Crayak’s game—and yet it wouldn’t, if he was just saving his own life (Andalite Chronicles). If the Ellimist doesn’t intervene the first time he does in The Stranger, the Animorphs will be eaten by a taxxon—and if he doesn’t intervene the second time, Visser Three will kill and eat Tobias (#7). Drode argues (with good reason) that the Ellimist had a hand in ensuring the Animorphs were standing just above where the Time Matrix was buried when Elfangor landed there to try and retrieve it; as Back to Before shows, if Tobias hadn’t become an Animorph then he would have become a quasi-voluntary controller and then been shot in the head (MM4).

The Ellimist makes a huge intervention in the time stream in The Change when he saves the hork-bajir and gives Tobias his morphing power back. Regaining the ability to morph might simply save Tobias’s life because it extends his life span far beyond that of a typical red-tailed hawk (#33). However, it also potentially prevents Tobias from just giving up and killing himself, which he has already attempted (#3) and is considering again as an alternative to starving to death (#13). At the end of The Change the Ellimist asks Tobias “Are you happy?” because that’s what he’s really accomplished: changing Tobias’s answer from “no” to “maybe” (#13).

When the Ellimist next intervenes in the lives of the Animorphs (#26) the competition between his team and Crayak’s for the fate of the Iskoort, it’s more or less exactly what it looks like—the only difference is that Ellimist only agrees because he already knows he’ll win, and that victory will enable him to continue to intervene and keep the Animorphs alive. Of course the Ellimist comes to Rachel at the moment she transitions from being a body to being a pure soul (#54), and of course he considers her one of the most impactful people in the universe. It is very possible that the hallucination of Elfangor which saves Tobias’s life in The Illusion was caused by the Ellimist, again to preserve his own life (#33).

Like I said, all of this is pure speculation. I have no idea whether it’s even a valid interpretation of the text. I just like to imagine that maybe when Elfangor and Loren brought this world into being, they had a happy accident along the way. That the Animorphs’ “eyes in the sky” might be the only guy in the universe capable of manipulating its fabric (#39). That one day when Rachel dies, the revelation about their guardian angel is something she never could have expected. That the guy looking out for the universe is one who can find the balance between killing one baby skunk and saving the rest of the litter, who sees a meteor crashing toward the Earth as the opportunity that everyone around him has missed.

#headcanon #the ellimist #emohawk #animorphs #loren fangor #tobias fangor #animorphs headcanon #long post

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