animorphslj | Z-Spaces: An Animorphs Psychochronography #4 (Reply)

#4 - Lost in images from a mind larger and older and so utterly strange (#4 The Message)

It's October 1996. "Macarena" keeps a death grip on pop music, the summer movie season had come to an end and people were now turning to films like The First Wives Club and Sleepers. Beast Wars debuts on television, reinventing the Transformers franchise into something that isn't obvious thirty-minute toy commercials. In real news, the US launches Operation Desert Strike, a series of cruise missile strikes against Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein starting genocidal campaign against the Kurds. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, banning all nuclear explosions for any reason, is signed in the United Nations, which nobody ever actually follows. And finally, the O.J. Simpson trial begins.

Back in August, a three-year old boy had climbed the wall of a gorilla encampment at the Brookfield Zoo in Brookfield, Illinois and fell more than eighteen feet to the hard concrete floor below, knocking himself unconscious. At this, one the female gorillas named Binti Jua walked over, cradled the boy like her own infant, and carefully carried him to one of the service entrances. The incident became a brief media sensation, and people began to debate the nature of the animal's act. Was it some kind of training, or a shining example of altruism in the animal kingdom? No doubt, K.A. Applegate was watching the incident and thought to herself two things: "I'm gonna do that in one of my books, only have it be a crocodile pit! Yeah!" and "What exactly was the gorilla thinking?"

So far we've discussed the alien invasion side of Animorphs, so it's time we touched upon the morphing aspect. One of the key motivations for K.A. Applegate in the creation of Animorphs was the idea of getting inside an animal's head and seeing through its eyes. Applegate credited this as an interest in existential phenomenology, the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. In the case of Animorphs, the act of morphing produces a completely new structure, the processing of human thoughts and memories through the brain chemistry of an animal. For the first three books, this followed along a steady concept. The Animorphs would morph an animal, struggle against its instrincts, be it the playfulness of a dog or predatory instincts of a hawk or the ongoing fear of a shrew, and eventually win out. But then comes book four, and everything changes.

In this book, the Animorphs morph dolphins and encounter a humpback whale, finding they are able to communicate with it in a way that is at least partly telepathic, as it is able to project images into their minds with an unsettling amount of clarity. Regardless on one's opinion on the communicativeness of "whale songs," this act clearly goes beyond basic animal instincts into a realm far deeper and mythic, and brings the series to a point where it straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy. Now, this aspect of sea mammals communicating with each other through mythic means has its roots in some of the more marketable aspects of New Age, a hard-to-pin-down spiritual movement that began in the 1960s and continues to this day with rising and falling popularity. New Age is a very difficult thing to define, as it draws from so many things that people participate in it pick and choose from, many of them contradictory: atheism, monotheism, pantheism, virtually every popular religion, philosophy, self-help, Gaia theory, astronomy, astrology, quantum physics, environmentalism, etc. Two of the biggest marketable images of the New Age movement would prove to be very important to the mythology of Animorphs: dolphins and crystals (dreams about alien forests in a bubble on the bottom of the ocean wouldn't be too far fetched for New Age).

I suppose if you were to define the core concept of New Age, it would be the seeking of unity between the mind, body and soul. In Nevill Drury's 2004 book "The New Age: Searching for the Spiritual Self," he positioned the movement as "a worldview that includes both science and spirituality." This could be seen as the mission statement of morphing itself, as with each morph, the Animorphs must obtain a unity between their new bodies and their consciousness. It is both an act of advanced scientific technology and an act of the spirit. This reflects on the merging of science fiction and fantasy that the series itself participates in. Science fiction can be seen as being about man and his relationship with his tools, while fantasy can be seen as man and his relationship with concepts. Morphing, the central concept of the entire series, is both a tool AND a concept at the same time, and this walking the line gives the characters access to a new avenue to view the world. An avenue that includes magic talking whales.

This all leads up something I plan to cover in greater detail as this series goes on: the Animorphs journey towards enlightenment. That word carries a lot of baggage, all of which I plan to unpack.