This series was formative for me. It, along with Brian Jacques’s Redwall, kicked off my interest in SFF. I remember thinking “‘science fiction’ must mean something that could be true—like people being infested by Yeerks and no one knowing about it.” I remember ordering the books via the Scholastic Book Club in the late 90s, through newsprint catalogs that looked like this:
An old-school Scholastic Book Club catalog. (via Tumblr)
Despite these memories, I had only ever finished about two-thirds of the series, and I knew nothing of how it ended, except grimly.
Present day: I and a few co-readers had been talking about returning to the series for some time. The ebooks are freely available on the Internet, with the author’s approval. In 2022, I could find no greater comfort than indulging in the stories I’d loved as a child. Thus: my Great Animorphs Re-Read. There are far too many books in the series to do individual reviews, but I will be sharing my big takeaways from a craft and storytelling perspective (series-end spoilers ahead).
So, without further ado…
It Still Slaps
Sarah Gailey put it well, y’all. From Book #1, things start hitting and hitting hard, and the stakes only ratchet up from there. This is an incredible series that holds up, tackling big themes with strong, smart characters. It is often (still!) very funny.
From a craft perspective, K. A. Applegate (a pen name for co-authors Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant) and their ghostwriters keep to a tight, sparse style that never overwrites. Instead, by providing something analogous to line drawings of scenes and characters, they let the reader’s imagination fill in the gaps. This kind of accessibility makes sense for the middle grade audience, but it works for me as an adult reader, too. In fact, I think I tend toward a similar style in my own writing, and I wonder how much of that orientation is influenced by having mainlined this series as a kid.
The gorgeous back cover of The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, which remains one of the best entries in the series.
Plot-wise, there’s death and betrayal and heartbreak and genocide and so much more that you wouldn’t expect from a middle-grade series. Critics more qualified than me have written about the trans allegory embedded in the idea of shape-shifting kids who live in hiding, and in particular about the complexities of Tobias, who becomes trapped in a hawk’s body after spending too much time in morph.
(content warning: suicide)
In the third book, Tobias attempted a red-tailed-hawk form of suicide, flying at speeding-bullet hawk-dive speed, first into a brick wall, then towards a glass skylight. Only the intervention of a few friends kept him from killing himself, ruining the body into which he found himself trapped. The books are for children, so the text doesn’t read, “Tobias was trapped in the wrong body and wanted to kill himself.” And at other points in the series, he seemed to relish the opportunity to fly away from his human troubles, his school bullies and abusive guardians. And still later, through a somewhat ham-handed plot device, he regains the ability to morph from hawk into another creature, including his own human body, for two-hour intervals. His relationship to his sense of bodily wrongness is complicated. Regardless, Tobias’s narration is full of longing and angst, waves of self-disgust each time he chokes down a rodent, grim musings on how long he’ll survive in a wild body that doesn’t match his mind.
This tonal darkness explains why Animorphs, more than other texts with transfigurative plot devices, captivated my generation of proto-trans readers.
I have seen fewer discussions of how the series is functionally about multiple members of multiple species wanting to inhabit bodies different than their own—how the entire war is driven by these desires and their paths to resolution. I would love to see or hear from more trans and disabled critics, particularly in regard to the casual ableism in the early books vs. the motions towards disability representation in the later books. (It looks like a podcast called Animorphuckery may offer me some of the takes I’m hoping for.)
As my co-reader N. so accurately put it, though:
Sometimes you gotta step back and recognize that these books include stuff like turning into a spider, getting swallowed by a crow, trying to demorph, struggling because your mind is dying, then being inspired by the memory of your mind controlled mother to burst out of the crow’s body, presumably killing it.
The Sharing Is Terr(ify)ing
It is perhaps unsurprising to anyone who knows my personal situation that, out of all these gritty themes, the through-line I find most chilling as an adult is The Sharing:
The Sharing is a front organization for Controllers. On the surface, it’s a sort of club. Kids join it and go on camp-outs and field trips and stuff. Adults join it and supposedly do business deals together and take weekends at ski resorts.
And probably most members of The Sharing never even know what’s really going on.
But the Controllers who run The Sharing are always on the lookout for some person with problems. See, the Yeerks don’t just spread by forcing themselves on people. A lot of people become Controllers by choice. I guess they want to feel like they’re part of something bigger.
Cassie vs. Rachel: A Case of the Saggy Middle
Now, before anyone comes at me, I don’t think any of the main characters gets a weak arc over the course of the series. And, while most of the books in the 23-40 range were ghostwritten filler, many of them do function as interesting character studies.
Cassie morphs a Yeerk on the cover of The Sickness (#29).
But I have a bone to pick with Cassie and Rachel. Neither of our two main female leads is entangled to the degree the male characters are, 6 so their middle books are a bit of a grab bag. Cassie’s filler books are generally more interesting than Rachel’s: they test her compassion (sort of)—leading to some wild moralizing—but more to the point, they put her in high-stakes situations where everything depends on her competency under fire (brain surgery, anyone?). This makes for compelling, if not wholly plot-relevant, reading. (I do wish the manipulativeness we’d seen coming out of Cassie in the David saga—something that was initially positioned as the shadow side of her sensitivity—had been further tested in the later books. Still, we did get her making the brilliantly uncalculated decision to let Tom escape with the morphing cube, leading to a fun Ax book in which he wonders whether it’s the emotion-imbalanced Cassies of the world who are truly the most dangerous.)
Rachel’s books, on the other hand, are a mess. Despite her ostensibly having the most tragic arc overall, her character is woefully undermined in the back half of the series. She has gestures toward a particularly compelling conflict early on in Book #2, when she morphs a cat and, feeling insecure, leans on the cat’s confidence so she can be the strong, brave person the others expect her to be. But over the course of the series, she loses that complicated insecurity in favor of a much more straightforward tension around her love of battle. She also frequently acts in ways that are straight-up painful to read (“I’m like Oedipus, but the hero part, not the hubris part”), which is disappointing given she’s painted as a character whose looks belie how smart and competent she is. It also bears mentioning that she is terribly mistreated in Book #32, the only book I DNF’ed, when she morphs a starfish and is split into “Nice Rachel” and “Mean Rachel.” 7
A Pre-9/11 Series, And It Shows
Ax morphs an American fighter pilot on the cover of The Deception (#46).
Animorphs occupies interesting political territory in that it was socially ahead of its time, but also remains very much an artifact of the 90s. It’s critical of war and American imperialism—the Yeerks literally call Andalites the “meddlers of the galaxy”—and it has things to say about the right to self-determination that feel ever more immediate today given ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Palestine, and elsewhere, not to mention here in the so-called US. Plus there are the aforementioned gestures towards disability justice, a multi-culti cast, and a single implied instance of queer rep.
But it can feel nearly impossible to imagine this series succeeding, either content- or popularity-wise, in a post-9/11 world. (The final book was released just months before that event.) Reading as an adult, it can sometimes seem like there is some willful ignorance on KAA’s part about the real impacts of domestic ills like racism, state-sponsored violence, and the confluence of the two. (Yes, there is at least one book, Megamorphs #3, where Cassie experiences racism directly—but there is another, #37, where the kids avoid taking their battle to a police station because “none of us wanted the accidental death of a real, hardworking human cop on our hands.”)
This issue feels most present for me in Book #8, where the Animorphs learn about Seerow’s Kindness and Ax fears they will hate the Andalites for having given technology to the Yeerks, enabling the Yeerks to become colonizers. Instead, the kids reassure Ax that Seerow “just hooked up with the wrong species.” Humans, they say, are all on the same side—the side of freedom. As everyone chimes in with “Freedom!” they stop just short of doing a team hand-stack.
Tell Me You’re a Horror Series Without Telling me You’re a Horror Series
I took a horror writing workshop with Nino Cipri early on in the pandemic (they’re teaching another one this fall!), and one of the points they made was that a piece of work does not have to be of the horror genre to be horrifying:
The great thing about horror is that you can slip it into other genres; single moments or scenes in an otherwise totally unrelated genre. By evoking [fear, terror, revulsion, or dread], you can scale horror up or down, make an entire narrative horror or just a single moment.
With that in mind, Animorphs is one of the most wildly horrifying non-horror series I have ever had the pleasure of reading:
Tobias spends most of Book #33 literally being tortured
Book #36 includes bodies that are dissected while alive and stitched back up to become living mummies
Book #39 features not only a buffalo-human homunculus but also ANT-CASSIE (!!!)
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not find the payoff of the series-long emphasis that “Andalites don’t have mouths” to be deeply, viscerally repulsive (Book #54 did not have to go that hard).
Have I Kept My Promise?
Fifty-four-plus books. A handful of duds, many more compelling, some like gut-punches that I’m still recovering from.
Almost 1.5 million words, 33% longer than the entire Harry Potter series, from an author who is infinitely less TERFy.
A propaganda coup from Big Thermal and Cinnabon.
Five stars out of five. Would read, and recommend, again.
“DON’T FORGET, a huge voice said. TWO HOURS, TOBIAS.
I didn’t ask what the Ellimist meant. I knew. I had acquired my own human DNA. But it was just a morph. If I stayed in my old human body I would be trapped there forever. Never again to morph. Never again to be a hawk. Never again to fly.
HAVE I KEPT MY PROMISE?
<Yes,> I said.
AND ARE YOU HAPPY, TOBIAS?”
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Well, nearly the entire series. I skipped books 41-44, and the Alternamorphs books. ↩
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Is there a better single line to tell you who a young Elfangor is than:
<Yeerks!> I said. <We’re going to burn some Yeerks!> I hoped I sounded tough and fierce. ↩
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The Hork-Bajir Chronicles hits different as an adult. The humiliation of Seerow. Fuckin’ Aldrea’s whole family getting killed in front of her. Dak as the ~different~ one, and all the ways Aldrea manipulates that. The way the early Yeerks talk about infesting as a bad trip. Esplin’s regard for the Andalites and drive to be embodied. Heartbreaking, terrible war. The awful luck with which the virus is released. “It was too late for Dak: He knew that the stars were not flowers.” 💔 ↩
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Once I had the seed money, several hundred million, I began to create The Sharing. It would cater to one of the most fundamental human weaknesses: the need to belong. The fear of loneliness. The hunger to be special. The craving for an exaggerated importance. I would make a haven for the weak, the inadequate, the fearful. I would wrap it up in all the bright packaging that humans love so much. The Sharing would never be about weak people being led to submit to a stronger will, no, no, it would be about family, virtue, righteousness, brotherhood and sisterhood. I would offer people an identity. A place to go. I would give them a new vision of themselves as part of something larger, erasing their individuality. ↩
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Most painful of all was the image of myself swallowing everything The Sharing told me. I had walked, willingly, to my own destruction. At the time I’d seen no alternative. Now I saw nothing but alternatives.
Was my home a dreary, awful place? Yes. Was I somehow marked as a bully magnet? Yes. Was I different, strange, not-quite-normal? Yes.
And to fight all of that I had destroyed myself. Brilliant, Tobias. Brilliant. All of life’s pains combined could not have equaled what I now endured.
Even now no easy answers leaped to mind. I could not easily have stood the bullying. I could not easily have survived the loneliness. In my fantasies I could construct fantastic escapes, but in reality there was no easy way. My life was non-fiction, not some story where the endings are always happy. I couldn’t simply become a different person. I couldn’t just have some great insight that would save me from myself.
All I could have done, really, was wait. I could have endured. I saw that now. It wasn’t a dramatic answer. Wasn’t exactly inspiring.
Endure. Outlast. Outwait.
I might have been able to do that. I’m not a fool, I know that school was just a part of my life. You spend eighteen years as a kid, then maybe seventy years as an adult. And what you are as a kid isn’t what you’ll be as an adult, not always, anyway.
Endure. I could have done that. ↩
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Ax/Tobias have Andalite/Ellimist stuff; Jake/Marco have Tom and Visser One. ↩
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Book #32 could have been a compelling character study if KAA had gone further than the reductive Jekyll and Hyde route—if, instead of Nice Rachel’s worrying about ditzy things like how it’s “so scary, flying, way up in the air with nothing holding you up,” she were instead wrestling with trauma from e.g. that time she flew through a guy’s security window as an eagle and got knocked out. Or if she were struggling with being the brave warrior the others wanted her to be for the real reasons of having been in life- and family-threatening situations. Or if a narrative about Rachel’s becoming plural had not ended in the two merging by necessity. Yes, “The Separation (Animorphs #32) (1999) could have been so much better” is the hill I have chosen to die on today. ↩
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Credit where credit’s due: in the epilogue-style Book #54, we do learn that the conclusion of the Yeerk war has exacerbated factionalism among humanity:
Terrorism had grown as a problem. Many of the worst were religious cults convinced that the presence of alien species on Earth was delaying a hoped-for Armageddon. Some were antigovernment paranoids who had convinced themselves that the Andalites were taking over Earth. Others were sort of latter-day racists who simply needed someone to hate and focused on the Hork-Bajir. Then there were the ecology extremists who just hated anything new and technological. ↩