Wars Don’t End Happily
The Animorphs series refused to shy away from the most heartbreaking and emotionally complex parts of reality.
Review by Cort Gatliff
If you were to stroll through the stacks in the children’s section of the Northville, Michigan, public library circa the spring of 2001, you would likely find nine-year-old me, clad in husky jeans and a Land’s End polo shirt, searching the shelves with no small amount of desperation for the latest installment of K. A. Applegate’s science fiction saga Animorphs. For a period of eight months or so, this epic fifty-four-book series about five teenagers tasked with combating a clandestine alien invasion dominated my imagination. Like all great elementary school literary experiences, my love for Animorphs started at a Scholastic Book Fair.
On the morning of the book fair, I had been given a crisp five-dollar bill with the expectation that I would purchase something educational. I was waffling between a Michael Jordan poster or the new Captain Underpants when I noticed an unsettling book on a nearby shelf. The cover depicted a nondescript boy in the process of metamorphosing into a lizard. I put down my wares, read the first chapter of the first Animorphs book right there on the spot, and promptly handed my cash to the volunteer manning the register. By noon the next day, I had finished the book and was off to the local library to see if I could find the sequel. To my great delight, I discovered I was in fact extremely late to the Animorphs phenomenon—forty-odd volumes were already in circulation. And so my first pop culture binge began.
Published from 1996 to 2001, Animorphs tells the story of Rachel, Jake, Tobias, Cassie, and Marco, a group of friends who encounter a UFO in an abandoned construction site while walking home from the mall one evening. A gravely wounded centaur-like alien called an Andalite emerges from the spaceship and tells the teenagers that earth is secretly being invaded by Yeerks, a parasitic alien race that enters the ears of humans and takes control of their hosts’ minds and bodies. As his final act before dying, the Andalite gives the gang the power to transform into any animal they touch so they can fight back against the Yeerks. From this point on, they have to balance appearing to be normal teenagers with saving the world.
Based on this description, it should be clear why any pre-adolescent boy would be floored by this absurd plot. The idea that there’s a secret war going on all around us, that there’s a deeper reality underneath the mundanity of homework and video games, was exhilarating.
What set the series apart, and what made it so formative for so many young readers, is that the authors refused to shy away from the most heartbreaking and emotionally complex parts of reality. And they refused to talk down to their readers just because we were young. The kids in the story were thrust into a war they never should’ve had to fight, and we as readers were then confronted by all the horrors that came along with that. Over the course of those fifty-four books, the series tackled topics like death, depression, suicide, moral agency, abuse, loss, and trauma.
War in children’s stories is presented primarily as a heroic adventure rather than a dreadful tragedy, but Animorphs was different.
I can’t overemphasize just how dark these children’s books could be. In the first book, Tobias stays morphed as a Hawk longer than the two-hour time limit and remains stuck in animal form forever. The story draws us into his psyche as he wrestles with isolation, despair, and questions about his identity. That incident sets the emotional register for the series early on, but things only get more graphic, gruesome, and psychologically disturbing from there. As soldiers in battle, the kids are routinely placed in situations where they have to make morally questionable decisions that often lead to death and suffering. Over time, they even begin to derive pleasure from the bloodshed. At one point, another child gains the ability to morph, and after he goes rogue, they trap him in a cage until he’s permanently stuck in rat form. The description of this child’s internal screams as the Animorphs leave him on a barren island gave me nightmares. In another particularly troubling episode near the end of the series, the group recruits disabled children to fight in the war, giving them the ability to morph. None of them survive.
Children’s stories tend to portray war in simplistic terms. There are the good guys and bad guys, and those lines rarely get blurred. The good guys fight courageously, defeat the evil enemy, and peace is restored. Picture Han and Luke receiving medals in a celebratory ceremony after destroying the Death Star (yes, yes, I know things get more complicated after that). Picture the four Pevensie children crowned as kings and queens of Narnia at Cair Paravel after defeating the White Witch and her army. War was presented primarily as a heroic adventure rather than a dreadful tragedy.
Animorphs was having none of that. The message of the story is clear: war is pure hell, and it turns people into animals—in this case, literally. In Animorphs, as in real life, the “good” guys sometimes do profoundly evil things, violence leaves indelible marks on both the victims and the perpetrators, families are destroyed, and no one is ever the same again.
Applegate’s commitment to writing an honest depiction of war was carried through to the final chapter, where there are no glorious fights or happy endings for the main characters. Jake, the de facto leader, gives Rachel an order that leads to her death in battle. Shattered by grief, Tobias refuses to forgive Jake and flies away with Rachel’s ashes. After the war is over, Jake struggles to return to normal life, suffers from depression and PTSD, and ends up being accused of war crimes by The Hague. Cassie becomes an environmental activist and works to become a veterinarian. Marco, on the other hand, leverages his status as a war hero to become a wealthy celebrity and television star. After a period of peace, another threat arises, and a new war begins.
Applegate knew that the naiveté of childhood can’t last, and she wanted us to be prepared
It’s a sobering conclusion, one that many fans were upset by. Applegate received such intense pushback that she even wrote a letter defending and explaining the decision. “Wars don’t end happily,” she writes. “Not ever.” She reminds her young readers that soon they’ll be of age to fight, and she wants them to understand what that means in real life. “When someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows, and grieving parents.”
Just four months after the final installment of Animorphs was published, my generation’s simplistic notions of war were shattered by the attacks on September 11. Of course, Applegate couldn’t predict the specifics of what the future held when she architected this story, but she knew that one way or another, the naiveté of childhood can’t last, and she wanted us to be prepared. “Wars very often end,” she writes, “just as ours did: with a nearly seamless transition to another war.”
Cort Gatliff is the Assistant Minister for Discipleship at South Highland Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
