hirac delest - An Animorphs Final Statement

Although the series is published under K.A. Applegate's name, it is also written by her husband and co-author Michael Reynolds (who now authors of his own series called GONE, under the pseudonym Michael Grant). Both were involved in creating Animorphs and for all the writing through the series, but unlike K.A, Michael receives his credit at the beginning of every Animorphs book with the dedication note "For Michael".

From the ANIBASE, here is how K.A. describes how they came up with the idea for Animorphs:

"Michael (her husband/co-writer) and I were living in an apartment complex in Sarasota, FL. It was so hot all the time that we could only exercise at night, taking walks around the apartment complex. We'd written some YA romances by then but they weren't selling. Michael and I were arguing about what to do next. I was halfway convinced we should abandon series writing altogether. Michael was half convinced we should give up on kid's books, but felt that if we stayed in, we should try one more series. We both agreed that we'd had it with YA, so we decided on a middle reader series. I wanted to write about animals -- to put kids into the heads of animals somehow. And right there, as we lapped past the dumpster, we got part one of the equation: kids turning into animals. Then we realized we needed some jeopardy. Michael pointed out that if we were basically creatiing comic book characters with superpowers, we needed villains worthy of them. That added the alien invasion element. So, Animorphs was born on a hot summer night beside a dumpster in Florida."
While all of the regular numerical Animorph book covers were made by David B. Mattingly, the first two books were created by Peter Bollinger (#1) and Tim O'Brien (#2). Also interesting to note is that the models didn't begin to show up in full body shots until David B. Mattingly started doing them with #3, where they would show up in full loosely clothed outfits (conflicting with what the books told us about the Animorphs never being able to wear anything past skintight clothes in order to morph with them). This was David B. Mattingly's response:

"I know that having the characters morph with shoes and loose clothing is inaccurate to the books, but Scholastic and I preferred depicting the characters in realistic everyday clothing, rather than "morphing outfits." It makes the images more interesting, since the best part of the morphs artistically is when there is a complex blend of colors and fabric folds."
Every numerical book, starting with this one, has a one worded name for it, beginning with "The". The names for the books weren't chosen by K.A., nor were the taglines on the front cover of each book. They were left in the hands of the marketing team to decide once K.A submitted a brief outline for the upcoming books.

Also starting with this book, every numerical book now has a step-by-step page flipping animation at the bottom right-hand corner of every page. They usually start with the natural form (Human for Jake, Rachel, Marco, and Cassie; Hawk for Tobias; Andalite for Ax) and then end up with the animal that they are morphing on the cover. The Megamorph special editions are the only books in the series that don't feature this.

As for the Chronicles, since they don't have any morphing steps on the cover, the animations usually try and relate with the story in some way:

The Andalite Chronicles features Elfangor's journey through space in an Andalite Fighter (possibly in Alloran's Jahar) chasing the Skirt Na, then orbiting a few planets (Taxxon Homeworld), and then flying into a black hole (possibly leading into the hybrid world created by the Time Matrix).

The Hork Bajir Chronicles features a mock evolutionary (infestation?) step-by-step cycle, going from Yeerk to Gedd to Hork-Bajir to Andalite to Human.

The Visser Chronicles features a human walking up to the infestation pier, with the close up of a Yeerk crawling into the ear.

Lastly, The Ellimist Chronicles features the Ellimist simply vanishing into a puff of clouds from the cover.
Interesting to note: This is the only numerical book in the series where the morphing steps on the front cover take a total of 8 steps, including beginning and end, while all of the covers after this take only a total of 5 steps (with the exception of #54: The Beginning).

This book had the first of many mistakes in the series that were often pointed out by the fans. Many times K.A could not provide a reasonable explaination and admitted to it being a mistake. Eventually the list of mistakes increased so much that K.A created the acronym KASU, which stood for K.A Applegate's Screw Up. (Click here for a list of KASUs in the book series)

KASU / Continuity Note: Before the group leaves Elfangor to face off with Visser Three, Elfangor mentally 'zaps' Tobias's brain with images of the Yeerk Pool and several other things that would be of importance to him. Elfangor also mentally shows an image of a Yeerk to Jake and the others when describing the species to them. This is the only time in the series when an Andalite has shown the ability to do something like this, and is never referred to again. It is possible that this ability, much like Jake's thought-speaking to Tobias, was also scrapped later on by K.A.

ANIBASE: So what exactly IS the deal with Jake thought-speaking to Tobias while human, even though every other book says that's impossible? The answer's pretty basic: K.A. Applegate changed her mind about how thought-speaking works and forgot to change that part of the book. What a mistake -- Animorph fans have been hounding her about it ever since!

ANIBASE: In the original manuscript for this book, back before a proposed trilogy called "Changelings" became the Animorphs series, Jake was named Matt and had a little brother named Joseph. Cassie didn't exist at all! Good thing for Rachel this was changed later on -- she would have been totally outnumbered by the guys. Of course knowing Rachel, she would have handled it just fine.

ANIBASE: Originally, Andalites were described as looking like the basic big head, big eyes, little body, tiny slit-for-a-mouth aliens with beige skin that you see everywhere. K.A. was trying to be nice, she says, because she figured at some point there would be a TV show or a movie based on the books, and she wanted to make aliens that could be created on a modest special effects bdget. But Jean Feiwel, a Senior Vice President at Scholastic and the editor who read and bought the proposal for Animorphs, told Katherine Applegate that the aliens were too cliche. Stung by criticism, K.A. thought, "Fine, I'll show you!" and created the totally unique, hard-to-create-for-a-TV-show, blue-furred, centaur-like scorpion-tailed aliens that we all know and love. As K.A. puts it, "It was kind of a 'so there' moment."