Animorphs

I can remember being a little tyke and sitting in the living room staring in total awe as these kids morphed. I used to be enthralled by this show, and I still am. I have the videos. OK, sue me. I can't help myself, this show, I loved it. It's sort of a guilty pleasure. The show didn't exactly do the books justice, but lets face it; most movies and TV shows never can. But it's not bad. Though I was kind of mad when they didn't find Ax like they did in the book, I let it slide because they probably had no idea how to do it.

I loved the books. I loved(and still do)the show.

But it loses points for Effects.

The animorphs series of books was truly excellent. It was my primary source of reading material for five years. One afternoon, however, having seen an ad in one of the books for an animorphs television series, I sat down to watch what is quite possibly the greatest abomination in the entire realm of book to screen conversions. What would have been ideal was a series that stuck directly to the books, with one hour episodes. The books are short enough that each one could be covered in one or two episodes. Movies such as stand by me are an excellent example of how a story can be converted almost verbatim into a script. even a cartoon could have done the job well.Instead, we have a truly disgraceful effort.

The actors selected to represent the animorphs are FAR too old. the animorphs were 13 years old at the beginning of the novels, and yet adults were chosen to play them. 13 or 14 year olds would have been much better.

Furthermore, the plot bears little resemblance to the books, even going so far as to change fundamental elements. What on earth was this stupid 'disk' they were running around with on the first few episodes? All in all, very poorly done. 1/10

I remembered reading the books I've read when I was a kid and I think I took a view of the episodes of the TV show it was based on, but there are quite some flaws with this film including the part where Tobias revealed that he's the last to morph where as in the book series, he is the first to morph and the part where the Animorphs meet at Cassie's barn after their first alien encounter, they tried out their morphing abilities with Tobias as a hawk. Rachel's animal form was a cat while in the book her animal form was an African elephant, although in this show, she also acquires a lion form and Marco's animal form was a brown rat whilst in the book he never acquired that form.

With the flaws out of the way, there are some good stuff about this show. The acting is great. Shawn Rushmore did great, Brooke Nevin was good, and the rest were terrific. The action for this show is pretty amazing. The special effects aren't that bad including the morphing sequences with our characters and the music (including the theme song) was pretty decent.

Although, not a classic from the late 90s, Animorphs is still a watchable show if fans of the book series could get over it's flaws.

My first thought when I heard they were making a television series out of Animorphs? "How the *beep* are they going to that?" Well, apparently I am a primordial gizmo-challenged dinosaur. Nowadays, there is a wonderful shitload of what folks call "Special Effects." Or, "SpEff," if you will.

With Speff, we have managed to create one of the most horrendously adapted small-screen projects ever.

No, I am not a book snob. But really, the only benefit I got from watching this television series was a newfound understanding of the pronunciation of Tobias' name, and an urge to bash open my skull and gouge out every lasting morsel of respect I had for the books.

I had never noticed this before, but the thought-speak is ridiculous! It's like Doctor Dolittle gone Spandex! One day, when the 'Speff' and creative teams for television are better, perhaps they will try again-- with slightly better results.

Till then... 4/10

Watched some of it when it first came out. Re-watching it now after re-reading the book series, it's pretty incredible how bad the first few episodes are. Then it's pretty incredible how some of the later episodes are actually genuinely good, and much more accurate to the books than I remember.

Budget concerns force certain things, like Visser Three and Ax being in human morph a lot, or the lack of certain characteristic battle morphs like gorilla, elephant, grizzly bear.

Most of the young actors get better over time but the clear and obvious standout is Paulo Costanzo as Ax. The only other thing i've seen him in is The Expanse. He clearly understands his role better than a lot of the others.