This document compares the children's book series Animorphs from the 1990s to the more recent Twilight series. [1] Animorphs targeted a narrow age range of 9-13 year olds and focused on themes of war and morality without romantic relationships, while Twilight attracted readers as young as 12 and older due to its themes of love and relationships. [2] The author argues that children's media now includes more adult themes like sexuality in a bid to attract wider audiences, which may influence young readers to seek out content meant for older viewers. [3] Harry Potter is presented as a model that balanced themes for both children and adults in an age-appropriate way.

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Christopher Hatch
Professor Renee Hobbs
COM 410: Children & Media
28 September 2012
Old Vs. New: Children’s Media
Trends, and peer pressure can be a powerful force to combat anything a parent has to
say, especially if it’s of the opposite opinion. I was not planning on choosing a book for my
comparison, yet as I sat here thinking to myself regarding which form of media to discuss, I
simply thought of my favorite form of media as a child; and there was my answer. I loved to
read, sometimes flying through a three hundred page book in a single day at only eleven or
twelve years old. With that in mind, it was easy to pick out a specific title, deciding on my
favorite series growing up: Animorphs.
Animorphs was written by K. A. Applegate and published by Scholastic, was a long and
engaging story of six teenagers who acquire the ability to transform into any animal that they

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touch. Using this power, they secretly fought an alien overtaking and infiltration of the planet
earth. Each book was told in the first person perspective, with one character being the narrator
for each title. Animorphs was definitely geared for the 9-13, though I started reading them
when I was seven, even though the series could be rather dark at times with its themes which
sometimes included war, horror, murder, morality, innocence, right vs. wrong, and betrayal.
Finding a series to compare to Animorphs was much easier to think of than finding the
initial series to discuss. Animorphs started in 1996, when I was just six years old, and I read
them all within the next five years, stopping with the last book when I was eleven, and just
before I began Harry Potter. When I thought of a series, immediate Twilight came to mind.
Twilight was much simpler to come up with because it is much more recent, became much
more popular than Animorphs ever did or will, and there is a film franchise still churning out
movies with the final one to be released this fall.
Twilight, a four part series detailing the life of Bella Swan and her first love Edward
Cullen, who happens to be a vampire. This quartet details the struggles of their relationship, as

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well as opposition to their union from all fronts. Twilight was written for a typically female
audience for readers as young as twelve. Twilight focuses a lot on issues of love, loss, death,
betrayal, freedom, and making your own decisions. Recently this series has been turned into
five films, with the last being released this fall.
So why did I choose to compare these two, I’m not exactly sure, but I’m glad I did. The
first thing that I’d like to point out is the target audience. Animorphs has a very set pre-teen
male audience, which in my opinion is pretty inflexible. Any younger, and the reader lacks the
skills to understand the book, and any older and it’s too childish, and there are more
appropriate books to take their place. Animorphs was written with a very specific age group in
mind. Twilight however, geared towards female audiences as young as twelve, has a much
more fluid audience range, with some reports that even forty year olds were reading the series.
This brings into question that as time has gone on, has children’s media adapted to
include themes and interests much more blatantly adult than media in the same genre
published before? Animorphs definitely has some heavy themes that can be on the darker side,
such as when one character discovers that the mother he thought died years ago is really alive
and the commanding alien of the takeover of earth. As dark as that sounds, the idea of a secret
alien takeover is laughable, keeping the series in its appropriate age range. Twilight on the
other hand is about vampires, an inherently adult subject. One of my favorite authors of all
time is Anne Rice, a brilliant novelist that lured readers into her dark, destructive, and intensely
sexual depictions of vampires. True Blood, currently a television show on HBO that is based off

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a series of novels still being published, that has been called “vampire soft-core porn” is another
blatant example of vampires in a very adult context.
For these novels to attract such a large age range there has to be elements too young
for older reader, and elements too old for younger readers. I also ask,does children’s media
with adult themes make children more interested in media exclusively meant for a much older
audience? For example, would a child with a laptop secretly watch True Blood online because
they read and saw the Twilight?
I see a huge discrepancy with this issue of adult themes too young in my comparison of
these novels published years apart. Animorphs in its time was more than likely considered
violent, but left out themes of love, sex, and teen pregnancy, all which occur in Twilight. I would
ask if there was a series that managed to blend the best of both worlds for children and adults,
as non-offensively as possible, but I already know the answer: Harry Potter, which did a great
job of keeping all ages interested but was written in a way that younger readers would see
magic and good vs. evil as the main themes, but adults would catch all of the themes the kids
missed. What once seemed to be age appropriate (Animorphs) has turned into a quest to
gather as many readers as possible with in my opinion no regard to the lowest age of the
intended target audience.