Title: The Invasion
Number: 01
Narrator: Jake
Applegate doesn’t waste any time.
The novel starts with our narrator, Jake, at a mall arcade with his friend, Marco. They meet up with Rachel, Jake’s cousin, Cassie, Rachel’s friend, and Tobias, the weird kid from school who Jake protects from bullies. Jake tells us a little bit about this group, about how Marco is great at finding patterns and analyzing video games, about how Rachel is pretty but doesn’t let people treat her like a useless blonde, about how Cassie is an animal lover and the mediator, and how Tobias comes from a broken family.
The gang walk home but decide to take a shortcut through an abandoned construction site. As they do an alien ship lands, and the dying Andalite prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul approaches. He warns them that the earth is under invasion by the alien mind-control slugs, the Yeerks, who can take over a host body with full access to memories, actions, and the rest. Elfangor tells them that, though they may not be able to win, with some help they might be able to hold the Yeerks back until the Andalite fleet can come rescue the planet.
To facilitate their mission, Elfangor has them touch a glowing cube that gives them the ability to acquire animal DNA through touch, then “morph” into that animal for a maximum limit of two hours. If they stay over that limit, they’ll be stuck in whatever body they currently have, forever.
Before the kids can ask too many questions, they feel another presence and Elfangor tells them to run, as the Yeerk commander has arrived. They go hide out in the construction site as a huge ship, shaped like a battleaxe and appropriately called the Blade Ship, appears, with two “Bug ship” escorts that look like cockroaches with side-lances.
A tangent about aliens:
The aliens in Animorphs manage to avoid most of the Star Trek and Wars alien tropes, in that they aren’t just humanoids with funny prosthetics. Instead, Applegate created a bustling stable of extraterrestrial beings with weird appearances. Some examples from this first book:
Andalites: Blue-tan centaurs with seven fingers, two extra eyes on tentacles atop the head, and a long, scythe-blade-tipped scorpion tale that is a highly dangerous weapon. They have no mouths, and communicate through thought-speech (The same way the kids do while morphed).
Yeerks: Tiny brown-grey space slugs with the ability to literally wrap around your brain and control you from inside. Almost blind, deaf, and totally mute in their natural forms, taking over beings is their only way to experience anything more than a dull life. Yeerk-controlled creatures are called…Controllers.
Hork-Bajir: Seven-foot tall, bipedal reptilians with razor-sharp blades at the tail, knees, elbows, wrists, shoulders, and the top of the head. Often described as having T-Rex feet. Applegate develop the Hork-Bajir as a species almost as much as she does the Andalites.
Taxxons: Man-sized centipede-looking fellas with hundreds of little cone legs, pincer claws, and a big round lamprey-style mouth on the end. They are possessed by a hunger so strong that Taxxon controllers often self-cannibalize if their own host body is injured enough. Cannon fodder.
Out from the Blade Ship steps the only Andalite controller, and the only controller with the ability to morph, Visser Three. He descends the ramp and torments Elfangor for a bit before morphing into a giant alien monster and eating the Andalite alive, with pieces of the alien falling to the ravenous Taxxon controllers below.
The kids are noticed, as they naturally start vomiting, and manage to escape. However, in the ensuing chaos, Jake notices that one of the human controllers present is their principle, a man named Chapman.
So there’s our backstory: five teenagers have to turn into animals to hold off an alien invasion. Piece of cake.
The next day, Tobias convinces Jake and the rest that what happened was real, and they experiment with a few morphs; Tobias into a cat, Jake into a dog, and Cassie into a horse. While they’re all discussing their options at Cassie’s farm (with a barn known as the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, which serves as an easy source of morphs), a cop drives up and asks some suspiciously targeted questions about the construction site the previous night. Jake intuits that the cop is a controller, and when the officer mentions a youth group called the Sharing (which Jake’s older brother Tom already invited him to), they get even more suspicious.
Marco tells Jake that, after hearing Tom ask some similar questions, he thinks Jake’s brother might be a controller. Jake gets angry but is eventually forced to accept the idea after Tom gets really pushy about joining the Sharing.
One thing ends up leading to another, and the Animorphs discover that the Sharing is a Yeerk front designed to find willing (or unwilling) hosts. After infiltrating their beach-side meeting as his dog and hitching a ride on his assistant principle's pants, they learn that the Yeerk pool, where the slugs must rest every three days to bathe in rays from their home sun or die, is underneath their city.
Determined to fight this new thraet and rescue Tom and the other Controllers, the Animorphs use Cassie’s connections at a local zoo to acquire a few “battle” morphs: Jake gets a tiger, Marco gets a gorilla, Rachel an elephant, Cassie a horse, and Tobias a red-tailed hawk. With that DNA in tow, they make their way to a secret door Jake discovered in their school that leads downwards. Unfortunately, Cassie messes up and gets dragged down there by the cop-Controller, and the rest go to rescue her.
The Yeerk Pool is huge, taking up a massive cavern that is constantly getting expanded. Controllers whose Yeerks are feeding are kept in cages and forcibly re-Controlled by Hork-Bajir. It’s gloomy and sad and Cassie almost gets Controllered before the Animorphs turn into their battle morphs and start messing stuff up.
Now, one thing that always fascinated me about these books is the fight scenes. It isn’t very often you get to read about a tiger, a gorilla, and an elephant all coordinating their capabilities to kill stuff, but the fights in Animorphs are brutal. Rachel tramples a Hork-Bajir to death, Marco crushes a ribcage, Jake slices people up, Tobias takes out eyes, and Cassie sits back and gets people out of cages then turns into a horse to offer help.
The animorphs try and rescue everyone, but as they are escaping, Visser Three decides to establish his villainy. He monologues and morphs into an alien with a fetish for the number eight; eight legs, eight arms, and eight fire-ball-breathing heads. He reveals that he believes they are Andalites, not humans, and nearly kills them all before they escape through the door they came from. In the chaos Tom is re-infested, every escaping host is killed or captured, and Tobias is missing.
So they retreat. They retreat, and later that night Jake hears Tom come home and knows it’s an alien slug in his head. Tobias shows up as a hawk and reveals that he had to hide after the fight, for longer than the two hours. The novel ends with Tobias revealing he’s trapped as a hawk forever, but that he and Jake have decided to fight until the Andalites show up.
Some thoughts:
-The quality was something I was unsure of when going into this series again. I read this starting in kindergarten, so I don’t have much memory of the prose. I will say that Applegate is definitely no master of the written word, but there is a marked increase in the narration as the novel progresses, and as Jake must mature.
-The violence sticks out at me, but I always remembered that. Animorphs doesn’t hold back during the fight scenes, as I said, with dismemberment being a regular occurrence for these kids. We’ll be seeing a lot of really brutal fights throughout the series, which I appreciate. It makes everything feel like there’s a weight to it, like the kids are actually in danger.
Narrator: Jake
Applegate doesn’t waste any time.
The novel starts with our narrator, Jake, at a mall arcade with his friend, Marco. They meet up with Rachel, Jake’s cousin, Cassie, Rachel’s friend, and Tobias, the weird kid from school who Jake protects from bullies. Jake tells us a little bit about this group, about how Marco is great at finding patterns and analyzing video games, about how Rachel is pretty but doesn’t let people treat her like a useless blonde, about how Cassie is an animal lover and the mediator, and how Tobias comes from a broken family.
The gang walk home but decide to take a shortcut through an abandoned construction site. As they do an alien ship lands, and the dying Andalite prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul approaches. He warns them that the earth is under invasion by the alien mind-control slugs, the Yeerks, who can take over a host body with full access to memories, actions, and the rest. Elfangor tells them that, though they may not be able to win, with some help they might be able to hold the Yeerks back until the Andalite fleet can come rescue the planet.
To facilitate their mission, Elfangor has them touch a glowing cube that gives them the ability to acquire animal DNA through touch, then “morph” into that animal for a maximum limit of two hours. If they stay over that limit, they’ll be stuck in whatever body they currently have, forever.
Before the kids can ask too many questions, they feel another presence and Elfangor tells them to run, as the Yeerk commander has arrived. They go hide out in the construction site as a huge ship, shaped like a battleaxe and appropriately called the Blade Ship, appears, with two “Bug ship” escorts that look like cockroaches with side-lances.
A tangent about aliens:
The aliens in Animorphs manage to avoid most of the Star Trek and Wars alien tropes, in that they aren’t just humanoids with funny prosthetics. Instead, Applegate created a bustling stable of extraterrestrial beings with weird appearances. Some examples from this first book:
Andalites: Blue-tan centaurs with seven fingers, two extra eyes on tentacles atop the head, and a long, scythe-blade-tipped scorpion tale that is a highly dangerous weapon. They have no mouths, and communicate through thought-speech (The same way the kids do while morphed).
Yeerks: Tiny brown-grey space slugs with the ability to literally wrap around your brain and control you from inside. Almost blind, deaf, and totally mute in their natural forms, taking over beings is their only way to experience anything more than a dull life. Yeerk-controlled creatures are called…Controllers.
Hork-Bajir: Seven-foot tall, bipedal reptilians with razor-sharp blades at the tail, knees, elbows, wrists, shoulders, and the top of the head. Often described as having T-Rex feet. Applegate develop the Hork-Bajir as a species almost as much as she does the Andalites.
Taxxons: Man-sized centipede-looking fellas with hundreds of little cone legs, pincer claws, and a big round lamprey-style mouth on the end. They are possessed by a hunger so strong that Taxxon controllers often self-cannibalize if their own host body is injured enough. Cannon fodder.
Out from the Blade Ship steps the only Andalite controller, and the only controller with the ability to morph, Visser Three. He descends the ramp and torments Elfangor for a bit before morphing into a giant alien monster and eating the Andalite alive, with pieces of the alien falling to the ravenous Taxxon controllers below.
The kids are noticed, as they naturally start vomiting, and manage to escape. However, in the ensuing chaos, Jake notices that one of the human controllers present is their principle, a man named Chapman.
So there’s our backstory: five teenagers have to turn into animals to hold off an alien invasion. Piece of cake.
The next day, Tobias convinces Jake and the rest that what happened was real, and they experiment with a few morphs; Tobias into a cat, Jake into a dog, and Cassie into a horse. While they’re all discussing their options at Cassie’s farm (with a barn known as the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, which serves as an easy source of morphs), a cop drives up and asks some suspiciously targeted questions about the construction site the previous night. Jake intuits that the cop is a controller, and when the officer mentions a youth group called the Sharing (which Jake’s older brother Tom already invited him to), they get even more suspicious.
Marco tells Jake that, after hearing Tom ask some similar questions, he thinks Jake’s brother might be a controller. Jake gets angry but is eventually forced to accept the idea after Tom gets really pushy about joining the Sharing.
One thing ends up leading to another, and the Animorphs discover that the Sharing is a Yeerk front designed to find willing (or unwilling) hosts. After infiltrating their beach-side meeting as his dog and hitching a ride on his assistant principle's pants, they learn that the Yeerk pool, where the slugs must rest every three days to bathe in rays from their home sun or die, is underneath their city.
Determined to fight this new thraet and rescue Tom and the other Controllers, the Animorphs use Cassie’s connections at a local zoo to acquire a few “battle” morphs: Jake gets a tiger, Marco gets a gorilla, Rachel an elephant, Cassie a horse, and Tobias a red-tailed hawk. With that DNA in tow, they make their way to a secret door Jake discovered in their school that leads downwards. Unfortunately, Cassie messes up and gets dragged down there by the cop-Controller, and the rest go to rescue her.
The Yeerk Pool is huge, taking up a massive cavern that is constantly getting expanded. Controllers whose Yeerks are feeding are kept in cages and forcibly re-Controlled by Hork-Bajir. It’s gloomy and sad and Cassie almost gets Controllered before the Animorphs turn into their battle morphs and start messing stuff up.
Now, one thing that always fascinated me about these books is the fight scenes. It isn’t very often you get to read about a tiger, a gorilla, and an elephant all coordinating their capabilities to kill stuff, but the fights in Animorphs are brutal. Rachel tramples a Hork-Bajir to death, Marco crushes a ribcage, Jake slices people up, Tobias takes out eyes, and Cassie sits back and gets people out of cages then turns into a horse to offer help.
The animorphs try and rescue everyone, but as they are escaping, Visser Three decides to establish his villainy. He monologues and morphs into an alien with a fetish for the number eight; eight legs, eight arms, and eight fire-ball-breathing heads. He reveals that he believes they are Andalites, not humans, and nearly kills them all before they escape through the door they came from. In the chaos Tom is re-infested, every escaping host is killed or captured, and Tobias is missing.
So they retreat. They retreat, and later that night Jake hears Tom come home and knows it’s an alien slug in his head. Tobias shows up as a hawk and reveals that he had to hide after the fight, for longer than the two hours. The novel ends with Tobias revealing he’s trapped as a hawk forever, but that he and Jake have decided to fight until the Andalites show up.
Some thoughts:
-The quality was something I was unsure of when going into this series again. I read this starting in kindergarten, so I don’t have much memory of the prose. I will say that Applegate is definitely no master of the written word, but there is a marked increase in the narration as the novel progresses, and as Jake must mature.
-The violence sticks out at me, but I always remembered that. Animorphs doesn’t hold back during the fight scenes, as I said, with dismemberment being a regular occurrence for these kids. We’ll be seeing a lot of really brutal fights throughout the series, which I appreciate. It makes everything feel like there’s a weight to it, like the kids are actually in danger.
-I've always wondered whether Applegate wanted to write horror novels or not, simply from how well she describes the kids dealing with the instincts of whichever animal they are at the time. Jake eating the spider ends up being a really small dot on the radar compared to some later morphs.
-The hopelessness of their situation sticks out a lot more now that I’m older. One problem I have with it, but I recognize as a necessity, is that the kids maybe aren’t paranoid enough, and neither is Elfangor. I laughed a little bit when I was rereading this, as the andalite pretty much just tosses them the cube and says, “have fun.” It’s never brought up in the books that any of the animorphs could have already been controllers (spoiler, they aren’t) and at this point we don’t know how long the Yeerks have been on Earth. It’s heavily implied that it has not been very long, as there are regular references to an orbital battle that took place recently, but the Yeerk pool is revealed to already be city-sized. The kids never even bring up the possibility that any of the others were possible already controllers.
-The novel moves at a brisk pace, even for only being 99 pages long. It’s written in first-person retrospective, the same with all 54 of the main novels, even though the first four or so chapters are delivered almost like a summary of events. There is a noticeable shift in the way the story is told at that point.
-Tobias getting stuck as a hawk so early was an interesting choice. For a long time I remembered it happening to him later, around book three. Having it happen so early lets his fate serve as a reminder of the potential consequences.
-The hopelessness of their situation sticks out a lot more now that I’m older. One problem I have with it, but I recognize as a necessity, is that the kids maybe aren’t paranoid enough, and neither is Elfangor. I laughed a little bit when I was rereading this, as the andalite pretty much just tosses them the cube and says, “have fun.” It’s never brought up in the books that any of the animorphs could have already been controllers (spoiler, they aren’t) and at this point we don’t know how long the Yeerks have been on Earth. It’s heavily implied that it has not been very long, as there are regular references to an orbital battle that took place recently, but the Yeerk pool is revealed to already be city-sized. The kids never even bring up the possibility that any of the others were possible already controllers.
-The novel moves at a brisk pace, even for only being 99 pages long. It’s written in first-person retrospective, the same with all 54 of the main novels, even though the first four or so chapters are delivered almost like a summary of events. There is a noticeable shift in the way the story is told at that point.
-Tobias getting stuck as a hawk so early was an interesting choice. For a long time I remembered it happening to him later, around book three. Having it happen so early lets his fate serve as a reminder of the potential consequences.
-"Idiot teenagers with a deathwish" is a pretty accurate description of the series. Applegate does a fair job of having some of the kids try and justify not using these gifts.
-Visser Three is one of my favorite villains of all time. He hams up every scene he stars in, and I can’t help by imagine his thought-speech being voice-acted by Matthew Wood, the same guy who voiced General Grievous. Favorite words include "fools," "Andalites," and "bandits."
Character Sheets (Yeerk kills are not counted unless it is explicitly described)
-Jake: Appointed the leader by Tobias, Jake is reluctant but manages to fake it well enough to keep his friends from dying. A little bland right now, but his concern for his brother drives him to fight. Acquires golden retriever, green anole, and siberian tiger morphs. Kills 3 hork-bajir.
-Visser Three is one of my favorite villains of all time. He hams up every scene he stars in, and I can’t help by imagine his thought-speech being voice-acted by Matthew Wood, the same guy who voiced General Grievous. Favorite words include "fools," "Andalites," and "bandits."
Character Sheets (Yeerk kills are not counted unless it is explicitly described)
-Jake: Appointed the leader by Tobias, Jake is reluctant but manages to fake it well enough to keep his friends from dying. A little bland right now, but his concern for his brother drives him to fight. Acquires golden retriever, green anole, and siberian tiger morphs. Kills 3 hork-bajir.
-Rachel: The "pretty one," but don't let her hear you say that. She's often referred to in the narrative as Xena, so that should be a clue about how she thinks. Acquires an african elephant morph. Kills 2 hork-bajir and 2 taxxons.
-Tobias: Comes from a broken family and never knew his parents. Looks up to Jake, as the other boy regularly saved him from bullies. Ends up staying as a hawk for longer than the two-hour time limit and gets stuck that way. Acquires a cat and red-tailed hawk morphs.
-Cassie: Rural farm girl who loves animals and helps her dad at his Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic. Often a source for new morphs. She's also revealed to be the most talented morpher, and regularly shows off by morphing fancy. Acquires a horse morph.
-Marco: The group smart-ass. Always has a quip or protest against the current or future plan. Lives with his dad, who has fallen off the wagon after his mother sailed a ship out into the stormy sea and vanished. The most reluctant animorph of the lot. Acquired a gorilla morph. Killed 2 hork-bajir and 1 taxxon.
-Visser Three: Megalomaniac yeerk general. Enjoys morphing into giant monsters, eating people, and talking about himself at length. Kills at least 12 humans.
Love the first post. I remembered Cassie getting her wolf on much earlier, but that might just be because horse morphing is so, so dumb. Also, Rachel killed a human being? What was the context of the, uh, murder?
ReplyDeleteI also forgot about Cassie morphing into a horse.
DeleteI went back and looked it over, and Rachel doesn't kill someone, she just picks him up and throws him so Jake "couldn't see where he landed." I think I counted that one before I implemented a little more stringent kill count rules.
Revised.