James Metcalf on the fictionality of the latest archaeological page-turners
Stephen Puddicombe looks at the unusual appeal of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Ciaran Rafferty investigates the science of book classification
In this series, 5 American teenagers, Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie and Marco (and later on their alien friend Ax) join forces to combat an alien invasion. However the aliens are not your typical Independence Day all guns blazing crew. Instead they are Yeerks, slug-like creatures that crawl through a person’s ear hole into their brain and control them by taking over their mind. Having already infected many humans and other aliens, their goal is world domination. The teenagers have one weapon against the Yeerks; after touching an animal, they have the power to transform into it. However, stay in the animal’s shape for more than two hours and they are stuck forever.
Growing up, apart from a few Disney films and Power Rangers, I wasn’t really exposed to much American culture. I read Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and Dick-King Smith and watched things like Art Attack and Get Your Own Back. So Animorphs had a flavour of exoticism to it; people talked and acted differently. And I thought turning into an animal would be the coolest thing ever. I even wished there to be an alien invasion so I could get this power, though probably I’d have been one of the ones enslaved.
The transformation scenes, where a person became a dog, rhino, bear – even things like an ant – were incredibly well done. Great attention was paid to the grotesqueness of transformation (like turning into a flea, but having a massive flea head because you haven’t started shrinking yet –move over The Fly!). And once you had transformed you had to deal with the animal’s brain. These were always imagined perfectly – the soulless automaton that was the event, the hyperactive squirrel – and each book would have a new one, which added flavour.
The books did get repetitive – Yeerks find new plan to attack humans, teenagers require a different animal to combat them, find animal, stop plan, almost die but escape, rinse and repeat – but towards the end of the books they do become incredibly violent and brutal. The single most terrifying factor of the Yeerks is that you can’t tell if a person is captured or not; the person remains the same but trapped within their own body, as the alien carries on in normal day to day functions. K.A Applegate really emphasises brings out the idea of a ‘total war’ in which everyone is involved and there are no compromises. One scene still sticks in my head, where (spoilers) the kids decided to blow up a Yeerk pool, a place that is essential for the Yeerks to regroup and spawn. Bear in mind this episode was written in 2000, before any events of the War and Terror and gives the whole scene a much more poignant aspect.
No one wins in war. That is the message emphasised throughout Animorphs and one our current leaders could take to heart. Throughout the struggle against the Yeerks our heroes find themselves irrevocably changed, longing for a ‘normal’ world but unsure how they would cope within it, so used are they to the fighting. Although I’m not going to recommend you go out and by all 53 books (+Megamorphs, extraneous characters’ stories and the flip books where you are an animorph) if you have them on your shelf, reread them and be sucked into your past.
You must log in to submit a comment.
