#christopher ralph

I’m kind of ambivalent about most of the AniTV casting, to be honest.  I do agree with PopArena’s take that:

“[Christopher] Ralph’s Tobias is very different from the book counterpart, more restrained and quiet.  But while it might not be the same character, it’s still a pretty good one, and Ralph does a great job in it.  It’s the little things, like how he holds his shoulders or how his voice might suddenly snap.  The books’ Tobias took the war against the yeerks as a chance to finally vent the frustrations he’s been building up from life shitting on him all the time.  But look at TV Tobias.  I doubt anyone’s dunking his head in the toilet.  He’s so detached from his surroundings, I doubt any high school bully would even notice him.  This conflict with the yeerks has forced him to reattach himself: to the world, to this conflict, and to this group of strangers he shares this conflict with...” (Opinionated Animorphs Episode Guide)

Book-Tobias, especially in the first few books, has a sort of Luna Lovegood energy: he’s so odd because he knows that reality is shit, and he chooses to respond to reality being shit by looking up at the stars and imagining nargles.  But that doesn’t stop him (or Luna) from being almost painfully attached to the first group of friends, the first cause, to come along.

TV-Tobias starts out a lot more hardened and aloof, closer to the version of himself that book-Tobias becomes later in the series.  And it’s a different character, but it’s still an interesting character.  I’m a fan of Ralph’s portrayal in that regard.  I find it irksome that he’s 22 while filming the series, and looks 22 (especially given that there’s a line in s1e17 that establishes Tobias as being 14) but that’s not Christopher Ralph’s fault.  If I was the director, I’d be giving Tobias’s morphing power back ASAP so that Ralph can play him instead of having to rely on That Fucking Hawk so much of the time, but that’s just me.  Among other things, human-Tobias’s absence means that there’s waaay more chemistry between Rachel and Marco than there is between Rachel and Tobias, to the point where I find myself wondering what they seen in each other.

Again, TV-Tobias is different, but not necessarily in a bad way.  One of the few genuinely clever plots in AniTV involves the yeerks getting ahold of Elfangor’s MacGuffin Disk, only to discover that it’s coded so that only a member of Elfangor’s family can open it because [handwave about andalite tech being genetics-based].  Even watching it for the first time as an adult, I thought “okay, this is going to launch a plot with controllers trying to capture Ax” and genuinely did not see where they were going beyond that... until Tobias picks up the disk and instantly gets Elfangor’s life story downloaded into his brain.  At which point I was like “okay, that was actually a clever way to handle that reveal” and also “damn that was a good twist.”  Between that and the late-series plot with Tobias discovering the underground group of ex-hosts, Tobias had about 99% of the dramatic potential of the entire team.

No one else really translates well — Rachel’s badassery is simply nonexistent on a show that can’t portray violence, Ax’s characterization is just generic “alien acts weird” thanks to a lack of andalite props, Marco’s sense of humor doesn’t survive the bad writing, Cassie’s morphing skill also falls victim to budget concerns, and Jake’s hints of good characterization get overwritten by bad voiceover.  Jake and Marco remain closest to their book selves, but flattened out to the point that I don’t feel a strong desire to watch an entire show about either one of them.

Some bts pics of the animorphs tv show. Kudos to anyone who can tell what is going on in any of these pics. (source)

While the source I’ve linked to is a fan’s random collection of pictures, I think the original source was the TV show section of Scholastic’s web site. Click here to see some of these pics - labeled with who’s in the pictures.

Animorphs - OTP - Tobias/Rachel