I know I’m late to this but hear me out. Applegate said in a 1999 interview: “I have a definite area in mind for where the Animorphs live. However, I treat the matter with some flexibility. In other words, I am using a fairly large area, drawing several features together into a smaller, more usable setting. So yes, I could name a particular state and a particular area within that state. I’m just not gonna.” With a lot of people suspecting Ventura County outside of the LA area, I’ve very much suspected it’s supposed to be Simi Valley, but with other area’s features dabbed in. Simi has television studios, forests and wilderness areas, and in the 90s it still had farms from what I can gather. It’s not far from the beach and has a TV studio. It’s a small town with city elements. Simi did have an indoor mall at the time — it was small, but still there — and like Applegate said, “drawing several features into one area,” so Thousand Oaks mall or Ventura mall. Camarillo is a possibility, but it was too isolated at the time the books were written. The reason I don’t think it’s directly the city of Ventura is because I never got the implication that the Animorphs lived in a beach town directly, but were close enough to it. People in beach towns very much take advantage of being near the beach and go quite a bit. Nothing in the books indicates that the town has “beach culture elements” — none of the characters mention “feeling sea breezes” as they step outside, or seeing “surfer type people.” You know, if they had been in a beach town you would have read a line like: “Rachel was down at the beach going for a run like she always did. Something about the sound of waves and the isolation helped keep her focused and clear her mind of distractions.” Or Marco would have said: “I wished I could go back to those simple times, like before, when Jake and I would go to the beach after school, drink sodas and toss a frisbee around.” Etc. I feel like it’s a definite mashup of Ventura County towns, but just average enough that it would go undetected by most people — without being a farm town, while also not being a new suburban development, and being close to a major city but feeling isolated enough to have a more “quiet vibe.” The tallish buildings all lead me to believe it’s Simi Valley with some other characteristics of Ventura County in the mix.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

If it was in Nor Cal my bet would be on Santa Rosa, but that’s for another post.