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ANIMORPHS (Kevin K. of MN)
Director:
Rupert Wyatt
Screenwriters:
Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver and J.J. Abrams, based on the book series by K.A. Applegate
Executive Producer:
Steven Spielberg
Producers:
K.A. Applegate, J.J. Abrams, Rupert Wyatt
Music:
James Horner
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie
Editors:
Conrad Buff IV and Mark Goldblatt
Production Design:
Scott Chambliss
Art Direction:
Bo Welch
Set Decoration:
Cheryl Carasik
Costume Design:
Jacqueline West
Makeup:
Rick Baker
Sound Editing:
Christopher Boyes, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle
Sound Mixing:
Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson, Tony Johnson
Visual Effects Supervisor:
Eric Brevig, Russell Earl, Roger Guyett
Cast:
Jake: Jeremy Irvine
Rachel: Jennifer Lawrence
Tobias: Logan Lerman
Cassie: Keke Palmer
Marco: Diego Boneta
Tom: Shawn Ashmore
Chapman: Bryan Cranston
Mrs. Chapman: Carrie-Ann Moss
Melissa Chapman: Emma Stone
Elfangor: John Hamm
Visser Three: Robin Sachs
Tagline:
Everything’s changing...
Synopsis:
Animorphs, an adaptation of the popular book series by K.A. Applegate, follows a group of five teenagers: Jake, a serious-minded young man, his jokester best friend Marco, Jake’s cousin Rachel, a beautiful gymnast with a vicious streak, her best friend Cassie, a humble environmentalist, and Tobias, a shy tagalong who none of them know very well. Cutting through an abandoned construction yard on their way home from the mall, they stumble upon a UFO as it’s crashing down to Earth. Out stumbles an alien with the combined appearance of a deer, human, and scorpion, who introduces himself as Elfangor, a warrior of the Andalite race. As the teens try to help him, he informs them that Earth is slowly being invaded by a race of alien slugs who take over a race by invading their brains, turning them into puppets, or “controllers”. Not wanting to leave the human race defenseless, Elfangor produces a mysterious blue cube that gives the five teens the ability to transform, or morph, into any animal they touch for two hours at a time (any longer and they’ll be trapped in the animal’s body forever).
Soon after, the Yeerks start to close in on Elfangor’s location. The kids hide as the Yeerk ships surround him, and empty themselves, introducing us to the various species of aliens the Yeerks have already enslaved (including the dinosaur-like Hork-Bajir and the massive cannibalistic centipede-like Taxxons), as well as Visser Three, the leader of the Yeerk invasion of Earth and the only Andalite-controller (some human-controllers are also in the mix). After a brief confrontation and battle, Visser Three morphs into a massive monster, eating Elfangor while his underlings destroy all traces of his ship. The brutality of the spectacle causes Marco to begin to vomit, and hearing the sound, Visser Three sends the Hork-Bajir out to try and find the source of it. The kids barely escape the construction site with their lives.
The next day, Jake wakes up thinking it all might have been a dream, but just as he’s about to contact the others, Tobias shows up at his house, excited out of his mind. He had just morphed his cat, and in order to prove it he does it again in front of Jake. Jake is stunned, less at the idea that his friend had just transformed into a cat than the fact that Tobias, normally a quiet and melancholy boy, seems to have been energized and excited by his experience with the aliens. It’s almost as if his life has finally found a purpose. Tobias starts to discuss what had happened, what the implications are, and the fact that he, Jake, and the others need to fight back against Visser Three and the Yeerk invasion. Jake initially resists (partially due to Tobias’s insistence that Jake is the group’s leader), but after testing his own morphing abilities with his dog, agrees to meet with the others at Cassie’s farm (her parents are vets who rehabilitate wild animals). Rachel admits that she recognized one of the human-controllers as Mr. Chapman, the assistant principal of their school and father of a good friend of hers named Melissa. Marco understands the implications, but doesn’t get why five teenagers have to be the ones to fight off an alien invasion, and Cassie (who has been enjoying herself by running around in the form of a horse) is just confused. Tobias insists that they have to do something, and Rachel agrees (we get a hint of their mutual attraction, and Rachel’s ferocious inner nature, in this scene).
Agreeing to make a decision later, they go their separate ways. Jake goes back to his house with Marco, and when they get there they see that a police officer is talking with Jake’s older brother Tom. The policeman introduces himself as a friend of Tom’s from The Sharing (a sort of Boys & Girl’s club that had recently been established) and was asking if Tom knew anything about “a group of teenagers who were playing around with fireworks at the construction site”. Jake and Marco seemingly brush it off, but as soon as they’re alone Marco says that he thinks Tom is a controller. This infuriates Jake, but Marco points out how suspicious it was. He even suspects that the Sharing might be a front for the Yeerks. Tobias then shows up, in the form of a Red-tailed hawk that he had acquired from Cassie’s barn. Marco tells him about his suspicions, and they decide to go to a beachside party that The Sharing is holding, where Jake (in dog morph) and Tobias (in hawk morph) spy on the upper-echelon members, and their suspicions are confirmed: The Sharing is, indeed a front for the Yeerks, and both Tom and Chapman are controllers.
Now armed with the knowledge that Chapman is a high-ranking controller, the Animorphs (a name Marco comes up with impulsively) decide to spy on him. Jake uses an anole (lizard) morph to follow Chapman around during the school day, and discovers a massive cavern beneath the school that he suspects could be a headquarters for the Yeerks. That same evening, Tobias, Cassie, and Rachel spy on his house, with Tobias in hawk form and Rachel morphing Melissa’s cat. By spying on Chapman’s communication with Visser Three, Rachel discovers the purpose of the Yeerk stronghold, or “Yeerk Pool”, is to feed Yeerks every three days and that it is currently being used as Visser Three’s headquarters. Also, there’s a brief sequence where Chapman’s Yeerk allows the real Chapman to speak to Visser Three, and he tells him that he knows the Yeerks plan to infest Melissa, and reveals that that would break the deal he and his wife made with the Visser, that they would agree to be infested as long as Melissa was spared. He says that as long as they plan to infest Melissa, he and his wife will fight against the control of the Yeerk, (making it more difficult for the Yeerk to successfully pass as human). Rachel-in-cat-morph then rushes to Melissa’s room in order to try to find out how much she knows. As Melissa begins petting “her” cat, Melissa tearfully admits that she feels like she doesn’t know who her parents are anymore and how distant she feels from them. Seeing her best friend so devastated makes Rachel’s mind instantly, and when the group meets the next day she says it’s time to attack the Yeerk pool. The rest of the group is understandably hesitant, but when she tells Jake it could be his only chance to save Tom from Yeerk enslavement, he agrees, and the Animorphs make arrangements to try to sneak into the local zoo, The Gardens, (where Cassie’s parents work) and acquire some battle-ready morphs.
That evening, Cassie uses her mother’s key to let the Animorphs in a back door to The Gardens and cautiously leads them to some of the animal exhibits. Marco acquires a gorilla and Rachel an Elephant, but before they can go further, a security guard spots them. The group splits up and runs. Jake and Marco try to sneak over a ledge to avoid the guard and find themselves face-to-face with a Siberian Tiger. Jake buys them some time by acquiring the animal’s DNA (acquiring an animal puts it into a brief trance) and then he and Marco slip out. They find Rachel and Tobias, but learn that the guard captured Cassie and is dragging her to the Yeerk Pool. With no time to lose, they steal a car and drive to the school. Breaking into the Yeerk Pool, they find Chapman and the guard interrogating Cassie and asking where the other “Andalite Bandits” are (they assume anybody who has the morphing technology is a surviving Andalite). When she refuses to talk, a Hork-Bajir guard drags her to the pool, trying to infest her. Just as a Yeerk is about to enter her brain, a red-tailed hawk dives down and claws his eyes, allowing Cassie to hide as she morphs into a horse (so they can carry away humans who want to escape). As the other controllers try to capture or kill Tobias, the others finish morphing into battle form and start battling them in a brutal and violent struggle. Just when it looks like the tide is turning in their favor, Visser Three emerges and morphs into a monstrous creature with dozens of limbs and the ability to spit fireballs. After severely wounding Rachel, the Animorphs realize they can’t possibly survive much longer and try to escape up the stairs and into the school. When Visser Three tries to follow him, a Yeerk-free Tom (who escaped from his detainment cell in the chaos, attacks him. This diversion buys the Animorphs just enough time to run away.
Later, Tobias flies to Jake’s house. He decided to stay behind at the pool to analyze what the fallout was. He informs Jake that Tom survived, but was re-infested. When asked by Jake to morph back to human, he says that in order to stay hidden in the caves he had to stay in his hawk form for more than two hours, and is now forever trapped in the body of a bird of prey. Tearfully, Jake says that one day the Andalites will return, and they will help defeat the Yeerk army. But until then, the Animorphs have no choice but to fight. Finally, in a heartbreaking epilogue, Melissa finds an anonymous letter under her door: it says that her father loves her more than she could possibly imagine, though he can’t yet show it. As Melissa reads the letter, we see her cat walking away from the house through the window behind her, slowly morphing back into Rachel as it goes along.
Awards Campaign: In an era when blockbusters are becoming more and more effects and action-driven, and most don’t seem to care less about either their characters or the audience who pays to see them, it’s a rare treasure when a movie comes along that not only works beautifully as blockbuster entertainment, but also truly engages the mind and emotions in addition to respecting the intelligence of its audience enough to take the material seriously. Animorphs is a movie like that. Like the book series it is based on, Animorphs is distinguished from other media marketed at children and young adults by the fact that it doesn’t disregard the dangerous implications and long-lasting effects of a war being fought between human teens and an alien army. This isn’t like Power Rangers or Transformers, where the main characters goof off and wisecrack between intense, but fun, battles. Half of the time, the teens in his movie are scared out of their mind, and when they fight, they actually fight. They know they have to kill to survive, and they also have to deal with the burden that carries on their conscience (the fact that most of their enemies are sentient life-forms being enslaved against their will adds another level of difficulty to this moral conundrum).
That’s not to say that this movie isn’t fun or funny. These are teenagers, after all. The group tries to deal with their problems using sarcastic humor, and Marco is always ready with a smart remark before things get too serious. Also, director Rupert Wyatt (who got the job after reviving another classic franchise with Rise of the Planet of the Apes) give us action sequences that are thrilling and intense without becoming incomprehensible and noisy. We know exactly who the characters involved are and why they are fighting, which makes the battles that more dramatic.
Of course, the screenplay (which draws material from the first and second books in the series) had to take some liberties with the material in the process of transferring it to the screen, the most dramatic being making the characters 16-17 instead of 12-13. This was partially done for the sake of convenience (using actual teenage actors would have been too costly) and partially done so Director Wyatt and producers Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams could amass a group of the most talented young actors in Hollywood today. Jeremy Irvine (War Horse) is Jake, serious and brave, who reluctantly takes the leadership position in the Animorphs. Diego Boneta (90210, Rock of Ages) is Marco, whose sarcastic and wisecracking exterior conceals both his own his inner pain (caused by the recent death of his mother) and nervousness, as well as a mind that is able to concoct and deconstruct strategies with ease. Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone, X-Men: First Class) is perfectly cast as Rachel, whose supermodel looks would never prepare you for the streak of violence and anger she possesses. Rachel is the only one who truly seems to be having fun when the Animorphs battle, and while that would be amusing in most other franchises, it’s purposefully frightening here: we begin to wonder what Rachel would have turned out like had she not found the Yeerks to use as an outlet for these impulses. Her friendship with Melissa (Emma Stone in a small role) and Cassie also shows she contains compassion, however, and a fierce dedication to protect those who she cares for. Keke Palmer’s (Akeelah and the Bee) performance as Cassie is also important, as she tries to be the mediator and source of calm among the often conflicted group. Her relationship with Jake is also important. Like the relationship between Rachel and Tobias, it’s not an obligatory romance or a spontaneous outpouring of love, but instead two young people growing closer to each other because of sympathy and agreement. It’s realistic and touching.
The adults in the cast also give strong performances. Though John Hamm and Robin Sachs are disguised with both makeup and motion-capture CGI through their screen time, they both make indelible impressions, with Hamm giving Elfangor strong dedication to his race and the Animorphs all the way to the end, and Sachs making Visser Three an evil and unstable, but sardonically clever, leader (channeling some of his role as the villain in Galaxy Quest). He’s not stupid, but he is single-minded, which combined with his capacity for violence, intimidates and frightens even his subordinates. Bryan Cranston as Chapman has a difficult part that he nails completely: he has to both play an alien passing as human and (in a brief but emotionally devastating scene) a human briefly given control back over his body. When playing the Yeerk, Cranston uses a subtly different body language and speaking style, but none of it is obvious, you never really notice how different he behaves until after you see the human Chapman regain control. There remains, however, a strong undercurrent of fear in the performance no matter who Cranston is playing however, be it Chapman’s fear of the Yeerks, his Yeerks’ fear of the “Andalite Bandits”, or both of their fears of Visser Three.
The standout of the cast, however, is Logan Lerman’s fantastic performance as Tobias. Lerman previously impressed in movies like 3:10 to Yuma and proved he could handle franchise material in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, but you’ve never seen him as good as he is here. His Tobias starts out the movie introverted and shy, hanging with Jake and the others essentially because they’re the only ones who can stand him. When they find Elfangor’s ship however, he’s the only one who isn’t scared… he seems more entranced. It is Tobias who is the first to attempt communication with Elfangor and seems to have an inherent connection with him… Jake has to literally pull him away so they can hide before the Yeerks land. Later, we find out about his tragic home life (never knowing his parents and being constantly shuffled between an aunt and uncle who never cared for him) and can understand why he seems to prefer being a bird to a human. Even before being trapped in morph, he has spent so much time as a red-tailed hawk that his body language actually starts to appear avian. It’s possibly the most complex role of the film (not to mention Lerman’s career), and he knocks it out of the park.
On the technical side, you couldn’t ask for a better crew than you have here. The production designers create both a realistic world for the teens to inhabit, while still making the aliens and their vessels realistic, scary, and (in their own way) beautiful. The Yeerk Pool is also a masterpiece of art direction, being hellish and frightening while still being believable as a massive underground stronghold for the Yeerks. Of course in a movie about teenagers who morph into animals to battle aliens, it is the application of makeup and visual effects make or break the material. Legendary makeup artist Rick Baker combines the techniques used in his Oscar-winning work in An American Werewolf in London with creative camera tricks and subtle CGI to show the characters morphing to and from the various creatures they’ve acquired. It’s realistically frightening, both for the teens and us. The Andalites and Hork-Bajir are created with a combination of CGI and animatronics, as are the animals that the Animorphs use. There are even times when they use real-life trained animals, though not for any of the more intense scenes of battle and carnage. Director Wyatt and cinematographer Andrew Lesnie use unique and dynamic camerawork to put the audience in the mind of the Animorphs when they're in animal form, sometimes using POV sequences to approxiamate how the animal sees the world, and at other times keeping the camera at the level of where the morph's eyes would be at.
In short, this is the type of movie that reminds us why we go to movies in the first place. It’s funny, scary, exciting, and moving. With a cast of terrific young actors and a director and producers who are at the top of their game, Animorphs is a film that can’t be missed. It works as an adaptation, it works as science fiction, and it works as cinema.
FYC:
Best Picture
Best Director
Best Actor - Jeremy Irvine
Best Actress - Jennifer Lawrence
Best Supporting Actor - Logan Lerman
Best Supporting Actor - Bryan Cranston
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Crew
Rupert Wyatt
Screenwriters:
Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver and J.J. Abrams, based on the book series by K.A. Applegate
Executive Producer:
Steven Spielberg
Producers:
K.A. Applegate, J.J. Abrams, Rupert Wyatt
Music:
James Horner
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie
Editors:
Conrad Buff IV and Mark Goldblatt
Production Design:
Scott Chambliss
Art Direction:
Bo Welch
Set Decoration:
Cheryl Carasik
Costume Design:
Jacqueline West
Makeup:
Rick Baker
Sound Editing:
Christopher Boyes, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle
Sound Mixing:
Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson, Tony Johnson
Visual Effects Supervisor:
Eric Brevig, Russell Earl, Roger Guyett
Cast:
Jake: Jeremy Irvine
Rachel: Jennifer Lawrence
Tobias: Logan Lerman
Cassie: Keke Palmer
Marco: Diego Boneta
Tom: Shawn Ashmore
Chapman: Bryan Cranston
Mrs. Chapman: Carrie-Ann Moss
Melissa Chapman: Emma Stone
Elfangor: John Hamm
Visser Three: Robin Sachs
Tagline:
Everything’s changing...
Synopsis:
Animorphs, an adaptation of the popular book series by K.A. Applegate, follows a group of five teenagers: Jake, a serious-minded young man, his jokester best friend Marco, Jake’s cousin Rachel, a beautiful gymnast with a vicious streak, her best friend Cassie, a humble environmentalist, and Tobias, a shy tagalong who none of them know very well. Cutting through an abandoned construction yard on their way home from the mall, they stumble upon a UFO as it’s crashing down to Earth. Out stumbles an alien with the combined appearance of a deer, human, and scorpion, who introduces himself as Elfangor, a warrior of the Andalite race. As the teens try to help him, he informs them that Earth is slowly being invaded by a race of alien slugs who take over a race by invading their brains, turning them into puppets, or “controllers”. Not wanting to leave the human race defenseless, Elfangor produces a mysterious blue cube that gives the five teens the ability to transform, or morph, into any animal they touch for two hours at a time (any longer and they’ll be trapped in the animal’s body forever).
Soon after, the Yeerks start to close in on Elfangor’s location. The kids hide as the Yeerk ships surround him, and empty themselves, introducing us to the various species of aliens the Yeerks have already enslaved (including the dinosaur-like Hork-Bajir and the massive cannibalistic centipede-like Taxxons), as well as Visser Three, the leader of the Yeerk invasion of Earth and the only Andalite-controller (some human-controllers are also in the mix). After a brief confrontation and battle, Visser Three morphs into a massive monster, eating Elfangor while his underlings destroy all traces of his ship. The brutality of the spectacle causes Marco to begin to vomit, and hearing the sound, Visser Three sends the Hork-Bajir out to try and find the source of it. The kids barely escape the construction site with their lives.
The next day, Jake wakes up thinking it all might have been a dream, but just as he’s about to contact the others, Tobias shows up at his house, excited out of his mind. He had just morphed his cat, and in order to prove it he does it again in front of Jake. Jake is stunned, less at the idea that his friend had just transformed into a cat than the fact that Tobias, normally a quiet and melancholy boy, seems to have been energized and excited by his experience with the aliens. It’s almost as if his life has finally found a purpose. Tobias starts to discuss what had happened, what the implications are, and the fact that he, Jake, and the others need to fight back against Visser Three and the Yeerk invasion. Jake initially resists (partially due to Tobias’s insistence that Jake is the group’s leader), but after testing his own morphing abilities with his dog, agrees to meet with the others at Cassie’s farm (her parents are vets who rehabilitate wild animals). Rachel admits that she recognized one of the human-controllers as Mr. Chapman, the assistant principal of their school and father of a good friend of hers named Melissa. Marco understands the implications, but doesn’t get why five teenagers have to be the ones to fight off an alien invasion, and Cassie (who has been enjoying herself by running around in the form of a horse) is just confused. Tobias insists that they have to do something, and Rachel agrees (we get a hint of their mutual attraction, and Rachel’s ferocious inner nature, in this scene).
Agreeing to make a decision later, they go their separate ways. Jake goes back to his house with Marco, and when they get there they see that a police officer is talking with Jake’s older brother Tom. The policeman introduces himself as a friend of Tom’s from The Sharing (a sort of Boys & Girl’s club that had recently been established) and was asking if Tom knew anything about “a group of teenagers who were playing around with fireworks at the construction site”. Jake and Marco seemingly brush it off, but as soon as they’re alone Marco says that he thinks Tom is a controller. This infuriates Jake, but Marco points out how suspicious it was. He even suspects that the Sharing might be a front for the Yeerks. Tobias then shows up, in the form of a Red-tailed hawk that he had acquired from Cassie’s barn. Marco tells him about his suspicions, and they decide to go to a beachside party that The Sharing is holding, where Jake (in dog morph) and Tobias (in hawk morph) spy on the upper-echelon members, and their suspicions are confirmed: The Sharing is, indeed a front for the Yeerks, and both Tom and Chapman are controllers.
Now armed with the knowledge that Chapman is a high-ranking controller, the Animorphs (a name Marco comes up with impulsively) decide to spy on him. Jake uses an anole (lizard) morph to follow Chapman around during the school day, and discovers a massive cavern beneath the school that he suspects could be a headquarters for the Yeerks. That same evening, Tobias, Cassie, and Rachel spy on his house, with Tobias in hawk form and Rachel morphing Melissa’s cat. By spying on Chapman’s communication with Visser Three, Rachel discovers the purpose of the Yeerk stronghold, or “Yeerk Pool”, is to feed Yeerks every three days and that it is currently being used as Visser Three’s headquarters. Also, there’s a brief sequence where Chapman’s Yeerk allows the real Chapman to speak to Visser Three, and he tells him that he knows the Yeerks plan to infest Melissa, and reveals that that would break the deal he and his wife made with the Visser, that they would agree to be infested as long as Melissa was spared. He says that as long as they plan to infest Melissa, he and his wife will fight against the control of the Yeerk, (making it more difficult for the Yeerk to successfully pass as human). Rachel-in-cat-morph then rushes to Melissa’s room in order to try to find out how much she knows. As Melissa begins petting “her” cat, Melissa tearfully admits that she feels like she doesn’t know who her parents are anymore and how distant she feels from them. Seeing her best friend so devastated makes Rachel’s mind instantly, and when the group meets the next day she says it’s time to attack the Yeerk pool. The rest of the group is understandably hesitant, but when she tells Jake it could be his only chance to save Tom from Yeerk enslavement, he agrees, and the Animorphs make arrangements to try to sneak into the local zoo, The Gardens, (where Cassie’s parents work) and acquire some battle-ready morphs.
That evening, Cassie uses her mother’s key to let the Animorphs in a back door to The Gardens and cautiously leads them to some of the animal exhibits. Marco acquires a gorilla and Rachel an Elephant, but before they can go further, a security guard spots them. The group splits up and runs. Jake and Marco try to sneak over a ledge to avoid the guard and find themselves face-to-face with a Siberian Tiger. Jake buys them some time by acquiring the animal’s DNA (acquiring an animal puts it into a brief trance) and then he and Marco slip out. They find Rachel and Tobias, but learn that the guard captured Cassie and is dragging her to the Yeerk Pool. With no time to lose, they steal a car and drive to the school. Breaking into the Yeerk Pool, they find Chapman and the guard interrogating Cassie and asking where the other “Andalite Bandits” are (they assume anybody who has the morphing technology is a surviving Andalite). When she refuses to talk, a Hork-Bajir guard drags her to the pool, trying to infest her. Just as a Yeerk is about to enter her brain, a red-tailed hawk dives down and claws his eyes, allowing Cassie to hide as she morphs into a horse (so they can carry away humans who want to escape). As the other controllers try to capture or kill Tobias, the others finish morphing into battle form and start battling them in a brutal and violent struggle. Just when it looks like the tide is turning in their favor, Visser Three emerges and morphs into a monstrous creature with dozens of limbs and the ability to spit fireballs. After severely wounding Rachel, the Animorphs realize they can’t possibly survive much longer and try to escape up the stairs and into the school. When Visser Three tries to follow him, a Yeerk-free Tom (who escaped from his detainment cell in the chaos, attacks him. This diversion buys the Animorphs just enough time to run away.
Later, Tobias flies to Jake’s house. He decided to stay behind at the pool to analyze what the fallout was. He informs Jake that Tom survived, but was re-infested. When asked by Jake to morph back to human, he says that in order to stay hidden in the caves he had to stay in his hawk form for more than two hours, and is now forever trapped in the body of a bird of prey. Tearfully, Jake says that one day the Andalites will return, and they will help defeat the Yeerk army. But until then, the Animorphs have no choice but to fight. Finally, in a heartbreaking epilogue, Melissa finds an anonymous letter under her door: it says that her father loves her more than she could possibly imagine, though he can’t yet show it. As Melissa reads the letter, we see her cat walking away from the house through the window behind her, slowly morphing back into Rachel as it goes along.
Awards Campaign: In an era when blockbusters are becoming more and more effects and action-driven, and most don’t seem to care less about either their characters or the audience who pays to see them, it’s a rare treasure when a movie comes along that not only works beautifully as blockbuster entertainment, but also truly engages the mind and emotions in addition to respecting the intelligence of its audience enough to take the material seriously. Animorphs is a movie like that. Like the book series it is based on, Animorphs is distinguished from other media marketed at children and young adults by the fact that it doesn’t disregard the dangerous implications and long-lasting effects of a war being fought between human teens and an alien army. This isn’t like Power Rangers or Transformers, where the main characters goof off and wisecrack between intense, but fun, battles. Half of the time, the teens in his movie are scared out of their mind, and when they fight, they actually fight. They know they have to kill to survive, and they also have to deal with the burden that carries on their conscience (the fact that most of their enemies are sentient life-forms being enslaved against their will adds another level of difficulty to this moral conundrum).
That’s not to say that this movie isn’t fun or funny. These are teenagers, after all. The group tries to deal with their problems using sarcastic humor, and Marco is always ready with a smart remark before things get too serious. Also, director Rupert Wyatt (who got the job after reviving another classic franchise with Rise of the Planet of the Apes) give us action sequences that are thrilling and intense without becoming incomprehensible and noisy. We know exactly who the characters involved are and why they are fighting, which makes the battles that more dramatic.
Of course, the screenplay (which draws material from the first and second books in the series) had to take some liberties with the material in the process of transferring it to the screen, the most dramatic being making the characters 16-17 instead of 12-13. This was partially done for the sake of convenience (using actual teenage actors would have been too costly) and partially done so Director Wyatt and producers Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams could amass a group of the most talented young actors in Hollywood today. Jeremy Irvine (War Horse) is Jake, serious and brave, who reluctantly takes the leadership position in the Animorphs. Diego Boneta (90210, Rock of Ages) is Marco, whose sarcastic and wisecracking exterior conceals both his own his inner pain (caused by the recent death of his mother) and nervousness, as well as a mind that is able to concoct and deconstruct strategies with ease. Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone, X-Men: First Class) is perfectly cast as Rachel, whose supermodel looks would never prepare you for the streak of violence and anger she possesses. Rachel is the only one who truly seems to be having fun when the Animorphs battle, and while that would be amusing in most other franchises, it’s purposefully frightening here: we begin to wonder what Rachel would have turned out like had she not found the Yeerks to use as an outlet for these impulses. Her friendship with Melissa (Emma Stone in a small role) and Cassie also shows she contains compassion, however, and a fierce dedication to protect those who she cares for. Keke Palmer’s (Akeelah and the Bee) performance as Cassie is also important, as she tries to be the mediator and source of calm among the often conflicted group. Her relationship with Jake is also important. Like the relationship between Rachel and Tobias, it’s not an obligatory romance or a spontaneous outpouring of love, but instead two young people growing closer to each other because of sympathy and agreement. It’s realistic and touching.
The adults in the cast also give strong performances. Though John Hamm and Robin Sachs are disguised with both makeup and motion-capture CGI through their screen time, they both make indelible impressions, with Hamm giving Elfangor strong dedication to his race and the Animorphs all the way to the end, and Sachs making Visser Three an evil and unstable, but sardonically clever, leader (channeling some of his role as the villain in Galaxy Quest). He’s not stupid, but he is single-minded, which combined with his capacity for violence, intimidates and frightens even his subordinates. Bryan Cranston as Chapman has a difficult part that he nails completely: he has to both play an alien passing as human and (in a brief but emotionally devastating scene) a human briefly given control back over his body. When playing the Yeerk, Cranston uses a subtly different body language and speaking style, but none of it is obvious, you never really notice how different he behaves until after you see the human Chapman regain control. There remains, however, a strong undercurrent of fear in the performance no matter who Cranston is playing however, be it Chapman’s fear of the Yeerks, his Yeerks’ fear of the “Andalite Bandits”, or both of their fears of Visser Three.
The standout of the cast, however, is Logan Lerman’s fantastic performance as Tobias. Lerman previously impressed in movies like 3:10 to Yuma and proved he could handle franchise material in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, but you’ve never seen him as good as he is here. His Tobias starts out the movie introverted and shy, hanging with Jake and the others essentially because they’re the only ones who can stand him. When they find Elfangor’s ship however, he’s the only one who isn’t scared… he seems more entranced. It is Tobias who is the first to attempt communication with Elfangor and seems to have an inherent connection with him… Jake has to literally pull him away so they can hide before the Yeerks land. Later, we find out about his tragic home life (never knowing his parents and being constantly shuffled between an aunt and uncle who never cared for him) and can understand why he seems to prefer being a bird to a human. Even before being trapped in morph, he has spent so much time as a red-tailed hawk that his body language actually starts to appear avian. It’s possibly the most complex role of the film (not to mention Lerman’s career), and he knocks it out of the park.
On the technical side, you couldn’t ask for a better crew than you have here. The production designers create both a realistic world for the teens to inhabit, while still making the aliens and their vessels realistic, scary, and (in their own way) beautiful. The Yeerk Pool is also a masterpiece of art direction, being hellish and frightening while still being believable as a massive underground stronghold for the Yeerks. Of course in a movie about teenagers who morph into animals to battle aliens, it is the application of makeup and visual effects make or break the material. Legendary makeup artist Rick Baker combines the techniques used in his Oscar-winning work in An American Werewolf in London with creative camera tricks and subtle CGI to show the characters morphing to and from the various creatures they’ve acquired. It’s realistically frightening, both for the teens and us. The Andalites and Hork-Bajir are created with a combination of CGI and animatronics, as are the animals that the Animorphs use. There are even times when they use real-life trained animals, though not for any of the more intense scenes of battle and carnage. Director Wyatt and cinematographer Andrew Lesnie use unique and dynamic camerawork to put the audience in the mind of the Animorphs when they're in animal form, sometimes using POV sequences to approxiamate how the animal sees the world, and at other times keeping the camera at the level of where the morph's eyes would be at.
In short, this is the type of movie that reminds us why we go to movies in the first place. It’s funny, scary, exciting, and moving. With a cast of terrific young actors and a director and producers who are at the top of their game, Animorphs is a film that can’t be missed. It works as an adaptation, it works as science fiction, and it works as cinema.
FYC:
Best Picture
Best Director
Best Actor - Jeremy Irvine
Best Actress - Jennifer Lawrence
Best Supporting Actor - Logan Lerman
Best Supporting Actor - Bryan Cranston
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Crew